Running a JSP Page
Assuming you have
installed all book examples as described in Chapter 4, first start the Tomcat server and load the
book examples main page by typing the URL
http://localhost:8080/ora/index.html
in the
browser address field. Note how the /ora part of the URL matches the Tomcat
webapps
subdirectory name for the example
application. This part of the URL
is called the
application’s context path;
every web application has a unique context path, assigned one way or
another when you install the application. Tomcat 4 uses the
subdirectory name as the context path by default, but other
containers may prompt you for a path in an installation tool or use
other conventions. When you make a request for a web application
resource (an HTML or JSP page, or a servlet), the first part of the
URL (after the hostname and port number) must be the context path, so
the container knows which application should handle the request.
There’s one exception to this rule; one application
per container may be installed as
the default, or root, application. For Tomcat 4, this application in
stored in the webapps/ROOT
directory, by
default. Requests for resources in the default application
don’t start with a context path (or more accurately,
have an empty string as their context path). For instance, the
http://localhost:8080/index.html
URL is used to request a page in the default application.
You can run Example 5-1 by clicking the “JSP is Easy” link from the book examples main page, shown ...
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