Currently velocity generation fails if the war file is not unpacked. This is listed in issues JRA-3558, JRA-3671, JRA-3788, and also JSP-65.

This appears a problem across application servers (Tomcat, JBoss and Weblogic).

Owen had a suggestion, which doesn't seem to have been followed up on:

" I think the problem is that it is using a file system loader and not a classpath loader.
See.
http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/developer-guide.html#Configuring Resource Loaders

If we jar up the vm templates this should stop the errors in tomcat."

We should investigate this, and fix this problem.