WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Packaging and Deployment

As a J2EE-compliant web container, WebLogic Server can host a number of web applications. Each web application is a logical collection of servlets, JSPs, client-side applets, and static web resources such as HTML pages, images, multimedia documents, etc. In addition, a web application may use filters, JSP tag libraries, utility Java classes, and JavaBean components. Each web application is executed in its own runtime environment provided by the web container—a handle to this environment is provided by ServletContext. We refer to JSPs and servlets as web components. These web components also have access to external resources and WebLogic enterprise services such as deployed EJB components, JDBC data sources, JMS destinations, XML parser factories, and much more through access to ServletContext.

Structure of a Web Application

A web application is structured as a hierarchy of directories — the root directory serves as the document root for all resources in the web application. These directories contain all the JSPs, servlets, and other, static resources such as images that are referenced by the application. A special directory named WEB-INF holds all resources that aren’t part of the public document tree of the application. So, a web client will not have direct access to any file stored under the WEB-INF directory, which is quite useful for protecting from clients specific resources in the web application. However, the contents of the WEB-INF directory are ...