JavaServer Faces

Example Web Application Overview

The examples for this book are packaged as a standard Java web application. All servers compliant with the JSP 2.0 specification support this file structure, so you can use the example application as a guideline when you create your own web applications. How a web application is installed isn’t defined by the specification, though, and it varies between servers. With Tomcat, you simply copy the file structure to the special webapps directory and restart the server. To modify the configuration information for an application, you must edit the application’s WEB-INF/web.xml file using a text editor. Other servers may offer special deployment tools that copy the files where they belong, and let you configure the application using a special tool or through web-based forms.

If you look in the jsfbook web application directory, you’ll see that it contains an index.html file and a number of directories. These directories contain all the example JSP and HTML pages.

There’s also a WEB-INF directory with a web.xml file, a lib directory, and a classes directory. We will look at this in much more detail later, starting in Chapter 4, but here’s a quick review:

web.xml file

The web.xml file contains configuration information for the example application in the format defined by the servlet and JSP specifications. It’s too early to look at the contents of this file now; we will return to parts of it when needed.

Lib and classes directories

The lib and classes directories ...