Maybe you should try to get someting simple to work. Consider a simple dynamic web project with a jsp like the following:
<%@page import="java.io.File"%>
<%@page import="org.apache.velocity.runtime.resource.loader.ClasspathResourceLoader"%>
<%@page import="org.apache.velocity.runtime.RuntimeConstants"%>
<%@page import="java.io.StringWriter"%>
<%@page import="org.apache.velocity.VelocityContext"%>
<%@page import="org.apache.velocity.Template"%>
<%@page import="org.apache.velocity.app.VelocityEngine"%>
<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Insert title here</title>
</head>
<body>
<%
String s = request.getParameter("test");
VelocityEngine velocityEngine = new VelocityEngine();
velocityEngine.setProperty(RuntimeConstants.FILE_RESOURCE_LOADER_PATH, "/");
velocityEngine.init();
Template t = velocityEngine.getTemplate("/template.vm");
VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext();
context.put("example",
s);
StringWriter w = new StringWriter();
t.merge(context, w);
%>
<p><%out.println(w.getBuffer().toString()); %> </p>
</body>
</html>
It just loads a template from the root of your server and prints it out in the current site with a GET/POST parameter.
In the WEB-INF/lib folder of your project you put the velocity.jar, the common-collections.jar and the common-lang.jar.
Important: In your server root directory you put a simple textfile template.vm with the following template
<b>Test $example<b>
You can also have a template directory or something similar but I tell you when you wanna deploy your templates with the webapp(loading vm-files from WEB-INF directory for example)-> that's a challenge!
Load it with yourproject/example.jsp?test=getparamh and I'm sure it work
But if you try this - admitdettly - simple example, it should work and you can maybe derive your targets from it.