Eclipse

Chapter 9. Web Development

Java has arrived on the Web with a vengeance in the form of JavaServer Pages (JSP) and servlets, and we’ll take a look at how to create these using Eclipse in this chapter. To do that, we’re going to use the Tomcat web server, which is the Sun Microsystems reference implementation for both JSP and servlets—and it’s free for the downloading.

Tip

Even though we’re going to use Tomcat in this chapter, the Java code we write and the XML files we edit are not Tomcat-specific. JSP and servlets both must adhere to their respective specifications, which means you can use what we develop here with other JSP/servlet web containers.

Installing and Testing Tomcat

You can get the Tomcat web server at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/; the current release version as of this writing is 4.1.29. Downloading and installing Tomcat isn’t hard—just unzip or untar it, which creates this directory structure:

jakarta-tomcat-4.1.29
|_ _bin                        Binary executable files 
|_ _common                     Classes available to internal classes and web apps
|   |_ _classes                Common Java classes
|   |_ _endorsed               Endorsed Java classes
|   |_ _lib                    Common Java classes in Java Archive (JAR) format
|_ _conf                       Configuration files (such as passwords)
|_ _logs                       The server's log files
|_ _server                     Internal Tomcat classes 
|_ _shared                     Shared files
|_ _temp                       Temporary files 
|_ _webapps                    Directory for Web applications 
|_ _work                       Scratch directory for holding temporary files

For web developers, the most important directory here is the webapps ...