Maven: The Definitive Guide

Adding J2EE Dependencies

To write a servlet, we’ll need to add the Servlet API as a project dependency. The Servlet specification is a JAR file that can be downloaded from Sun Microsystems at http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/download.html. Once the JAR file is downloaded, you’ll need to install the resulting JAR in your local Maven repository located at ~/.m2/repository. The same process will have to be repeated for all of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) APIs maintained by Sun Microsystems—Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Servlet, JSP, Java Transaction API (JTA), and others. If this strikes you as somewhat tedious, you are not alone. Lucky for you, there is a simpler alternative to downloading all of these libraries and installing them manually—Apache Geronimo’s independent open source implementations.

For years, the only way to get the Servlet specification JAR was to download it directly from Sun Microsystems. You had to go to the Sun web site, agree to a click-through licensing agreement, and only then could you access the Servlet JAR. This was all necessary because the Sun specification JARs were not made available under a license that allowed for redistribution. Manually downloading Sun artifacts was something you just had to do to write a Servlet or to use JDBC from a Maven project for a few years. It was tedious and annoying until the Apache Geronimo project was able to create a Sun-certified implementation ...