Scott Murphy

If you get an "cannot be cast to javax.servlet.Filter" exception likwhen running Tomcat from within Maven, or really from anywhere else, then you probably have an older version of the servlet-api defined in your dependencies or (most likely) have a dependency that depends on an older version of the servlet-api.

You can solve this by manually specifying which version to use in your dependency list:

javax.servlet
servlet-api
2.5
provided