Chapter SRV.9. Web Applications

A web application is a collection of servlets, HTML pages, classes, and other resources that can be bundled and run on multiple containers from multiple vendors . A web application is rooted at a specific path within a web server. For example, a catalog application could be located at http://www.mycorp.com/catalog . All requests that start with this prefix will be routed to the ServletContext which represents the catalog application.

A servlet container can also establish rules for automatic generation of web applications. For example, a ~ user / mapping could be used to map to a web application based at /home/user/public_html/ .

By default an instance of a web application must be run on only one VM at any one time. This behavior can be overridden if the application is marked as "distributable" via its deployment descriptor. When an application is marked as distributable, the developer must obey a more restrictive set of rules than is expected of a normal web application. These specific rules are called out throughout this specification.