What does 'URI has an authority component' mean?

An authority is a portion of a URI. Your error suggests that it was not expecting one. The authority section is shown below, it is what is known as the website part of the url.

From RFC3986 on URIs:

The following is an example URI and its component parts:

     foo://example.com:8042/over/there?name=ferret#nose
     \_/   \______________/\_________/ \_________/ \__/
      |           |            |            |        |
   scheme     authority       path        query   fragment
      |   _____________________|__
     / \ /                        \
     urn:example:animal:ferret:nose

So there are two formats, one with an authority and one not. Regarding slashes:

"When authority is not present, the path cannot begin with two slash
characters ("//")."

Source: https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt (search for text 'authority is not present, the path cannot begin with two slash')

I had the same problem (NetBeans 6.9.1) and the fix is so simple :)

I realized NetBeans didn't create a META-INF folder and thus no context.xml was found, so I create the META-INF folder under the main project folder and create file context.xml with the following content.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <Context antiJARLocking="true" path="/home"/>

And it runs :)

Flip over to the GlassFish output tab, it'll give you better info. Netbeans gives you that generic error, but Glassfish gives you the details. When I get this it's usually a typo in one of my JSP or XML files...

The solution was simply that the URI was malformed (because the location of my project was over a "\\" UNC path). This issue was fixed when I used a local workspace.