Installing a JSP Page
A complete web application may consist of several different resources: JSP pages, servlets, applets, static HTML pages, custom tag libraries, and other Java class files. Until very recently, an application with all these components had to be installed and configured in different ways for different servers, making it hard for web application developers to provide easy-to-use installation instructions and tools.
Starting with the Servlet 2.2 specification, there’s
a standard, portable way to package all web application resources,
along with a deployment descriptor. The
deployment
descriptor is a file named web.xml
,
containing information about security requirements, how all the
resources fit together, and other facts about the application. The
deployment descriptor and all the other web application files are
placed in a WAR file, arranged in a well-defined hierarchy. A WAR
file
has a .war
file extension and can be created
with the Java jar
command or a ZIP utility
program, such as WinZip
(the same file format is
used for both JAR and ZIP files).
Having a standardized web application format lets container vendors develop installation and configuration tools that make it easy to install an application. During installation, the container is free to unpack the contents of the WAR file and store it for runtime use in any way it sees fit, but the application developer needs to deal with only one delivery format.
Even though a container is required to know how to ...
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