Tomcat fails to complete startup, not accesible on port 8080

Issue

• Tomcat does not start up correctly

• The process is listening on port 8080, but Tomcat does not respond to requests to host://localhost:8080, the browser returns "Unable to connect".

• The catalina log never shows the started message :

  9-Feb-11 4:56:28 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
  INFO: Server startup in 3854 ms
  

         but instead  the last message is :

26-Jan-11 11:32:23 AM org.apache.jk.server.JkMain start
INFO: Jk running ID=0 time=0/45  config=null

• java -version indicates an unsupported version of java, such as

java version "1.4.2"
gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-50)