Chapter 5: Administering Web Applications

Overview

It may seem as if it’s not the administrator’s job to look after a developer’s application once it’s deployed. But, as Web applications are run on the server you have responsibility for, it’s important to know how they’re structured so that you can administer them effectively. In an ideal world, the developer will have set up the Web application so that it runs smoothly as soon as it goes live. However, this isn’t always the case.

A lot of code running on the server will have hard-coded paths to resources, which means that most applications won’t be happy when you move files. The developer may even have to recompile and redeploy the application. Therefore, knowing about administering Web applications is a useful skill to have.

In this chapter I’ll cover how to configure a context. (Remember, I didn’t cover this in Chapter 4 because a context is configured in a separate file to server.xml.) To do all of this, however, you’ll need to know where the various files are placed within a Web application, which has a well-defined structure.