8.6. The Web Application Archive (WAR)

The Servlet API V2.2 specification introduced a valuable new facility to aid deployment of applications. This is the Web Application Archive (WAR). A WAR file contains both the deployable components of a Web application (servlet code, HTML pages and JavaServer Pages) along with a deployment descriptor that specifies how these elements are to be installed.

In this section we discuss the contents of a WAR file and in the following section we explain how to use one.

A WAR files holds three categories of content:

  • Static data that should be installed in the document root of the Web application. These are items such as HTML files, JSP files and images.

  • Executable code such as Java class files for servlets and ...

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