Beginning JavaServer Pages™

Chapter 16. The Role of JSP in the Wider Context: Web Applications

This chapter will start to explore how the JSP fits within the server-side Java programming environment. All of the previous chapters have provided a thorough background on developing and using JSP, and this chapter takes the next step toward enlightenment, showing how the JSP components are packaged along with other resources to form a Web archive (WAR), the standard deployment unit for J2EE Web applications.

This chapter examines the composition of a Web archive and describes many of the likely configuration options needed for JSP developers creating a Web application. This chapter also covers a number of options available when deploying a Web archive, highlighting the differences between development and production system requirements. Finally, the chapter provides some examples of how to package and deploy a Web archive for the Tomcat server.

Also included in this chapter is a lot of background information about Web applications and how they fit into the overall scheme of development. While it is not essential to read and understand everything in this chapter, the contents provide another foundation stone in learning about JSP development. It is highly recommended that readers new to JSP and Java development work through the examples at the end of the chapter.

In particular, this chapter does the following:

• Examines the structure of a Web application

• Describes the important elements of the Web application deployment ...