Deploying Web Applications - JSP

In Tomcat, one of the easiest ways to deploy the application is to place the root folder of the application within the <tomcat-home>webapps folder. After Tomcat has been restarted, the Web application will be detected by Tomcat and made available to clients with the URL to the application being

Other Web containers will also provide a location where you can deploy your Web applications in the same way.

Deploying a WAR File

To make the distribution of Web applications even more straightforward, you can JAR it up into a single file, a JAR file. As discussed in Chapter 1, this file can then be given the extension .war.This can be done using the jar tool that comes with the J2SDK or with tools such as WinZip on Windows platforms. It is important when creating WAR files to ensure that the root directory is not stored within the WAR file.The top level of the WAR file should be the contents of the Web application root folder, not the root folder itself. Figure shows the contents of the WAR file.

If you are using Tomcat 4.1 or higher, you can deploy Web applications while Tomcat is running by dropping the WAR file in the webapps folder (or the expanded Web application).

All other Web containers have mechanisms to make the deployment process as straightforward as possible.

J2EE-compliant application servers were. These servers enable you to deploy Web applications because they all provide a Web container. Many of these servers provide a Web interface to simplify the deployment process. Figure shows the deployment interface for the BEA Web Logic server.