Spring MVC not called by Tomcat

Update: . Somehow, after the next round of adjustments and redistribution, localhost: 8080 / ping-1.0 / ping started working. The configuration files are still like this. I would like to know what I fixed without knowing it, but it is now resolved.

I struggled with this for a couple of days, tried all kinds of solutions that I saw here and in other places, and nothing worked. I have a Spring MVC controller deployed to Tomcat, but cannot access it.

Tools:

Spring 3.2.0
Tomcat 7
Java 1.6

Spring controller:

@Controller
public class PingController {

@RequestMapping("/ping")
public String ping (Model model) throws Exception {
    System.out.println("ping ping ping");
    String s = (new Date()).toString();
    model.addAttribute("message", s);
    return "ping";
}
}

web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<web-app version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>ping</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class><init-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/ping-servlet.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>ping</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/ping</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

ping-servlet.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">

<context:component-scan base-package="myclass.ping"/>

<mvc:annotation-driven />
</beans>

The WAR file is called ping-1.0.war. Deployment seems to be going well. I see a directory called ping-1.0 in $ CATALINA_BASE / webapps, and this is in the catalina.log file:

INFO: Mapped "{[/ping],methods=[],params=[],headers=[],consumes=[],produces=[],custom=[]}" onto public java.lang.String myclass.ping.PingController.ping(org.springframework.ui.Model) throws java.lang.Exception

Tomcat 8080. localhost: 8080/manager, . localhost: 8080/ping 404 Tomcat. , GET. . , URL .. .