11.1.1 Problem You need access to a JSP and servlet web container. 11.1.2 Solution Download and install the Tomcat web server, which is the reference installation for JSP and servlets. You can get Tomcat at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/ for free. Installation is easy; just download the compressed file for your operating system and uncompress it. Tomcat is a Java application, so no special installation is needed. 11.1.3 Discussion If you don't have access to a JSP/servlet web server, download Tomcat from http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/; just select the compressed file for your operating system. One of the good things about Tomcat is that all you have to do to install it is to unzip/ untar it. Tomcat is a Java application, so it'll run using your Java installation (see Recipe Recipe 11.2 for more information). We'll use the most recent version of Tomcat as of this writing, Version 5.0.19. Installing it is as easy as downloading it and unzipping or untarring it. Here's the directory structure you get when you do this: jakarta-tomcat-5.0.19 _ _bin Binary files _ _common Classes used by code and web applications _ _classes Common Java classes _ _endorsed Endorsed Java classes _ _lib Common Java classes in .jar format _ _conf Configuration files _ _logs The server's log files _ _server Internal Tomcat classes _ _shared Shared files _ _temp Temporary files _ _webapps Directory to use for web applications _ _work Scratch directory for holding temporary files
The webapps directory here is the important one; at least in terms of writing web applications; it's where to install your JSPs and servlet applications. In this chapter, we're going to store examples in a directory named ch11 , which is a subdirectory of the Tomcat webapps directory. Note that this new directory must itself have a subdirectory named WEB-INF , which must have two subdirectories, classes and lib : webapps _ _ch11 The folder for Chapter 11 examples _ _WEB-INF Information about Chapter 11's web applications _ _classes Java classes used by Chapter 11's web applications _ _lib JAR files used by Chapter 11's web applications
Note that although the WEB-INF , classes , and lib directories are empty here, they have to exist, or Tomcat can't serve files to the browser. We'll store the examples in this chapter in the ch11 directory. 11.1.4 See Also Recipe 11.2 on starting Tomcat; Chapter 1 in Tomcat: the Definitive Guide (O'Reilly); Chapter 4 in JavaServer Pages (O'Reilly) ; Chapter 9 in Eclipse (O'Reilly). | 