JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Web Application File Structure

The portable distribution and deployment format for a web application defined by the servlet specification is the Web Application Archive (WAR). All Servlet 2.2-compliant servers (or later) provide tools for installing a WAR file and associate the application with a servlet context.

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, as described at the end of this appendix. The internal structure of the WAR file is defined by the servlet specification:

/index.html
/company/index.html
/company/contact.html
/company/phonelist.jsp
/products/searchform.html
/products/list.jsp
/images/banner.gif
/WEB-INF/web.xml
/WEB-INF/lib/bean.jar
/WEB-INF/lib/actions.jar
/WEB-INF/classes/com/mycorp/servlets/PurchaseServlet.class
/WEB-INF/classes/com/mycorp/util/MyUtils.class
...

The top level in this structure is the document root for all application web page files. This is where you place all your HTML pages, JSP pages, and image files. A browser can access all these files, using a URI starting with the context-path. For instance, if the application has been assigned the context path /sales, the URI /sales/products/list.jsp is used to access the JSP page named list.jsp in the products directory in this example.