I set up a development instance of Jetty on my local machine and have been happily coding, compiling and deploying via a shell script. The script copies the war from my user’s target directory to the jetty users’s home dir changes the permissions and then moves it to the /webapp dir creating a symlink to the name of the .war that is referenced in a number of config files.
This was working just fine until I did a merge with another developers code and a significant portion of it changed that Jetty had problems determining whether or not is should dump it’s local cache of .class files and configs and got into a very funky state. Unfortunately, not one in which it was obviously funky, but where, all of the sudden I could not look up defined DataSources in JNDI.
Ultimately, after looking through many other different things, I decided to delete the symlink and, rename the .war in the /webapps dir.
Bingo, worked right away.