Apache Tomcat - What is it

mattgaunt

mattgaunt

mattgaunt

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20 May 2007
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441
Hey everyone

I've got to use a apache tomcat server to develop a website, however I've only ever done HTML and CSS coding and never done any server side programming.

I've installed apache tomcat but have no idea how to get it to display a normal html page, so does anyone have any good sites I could look through to learn about apache tomcat?

Any help would be great cos I've only ever used apache

Cheers
Matt
 
Ok, this is probably more complex than any other setup, and I barely understand it myself!

J2EE Server Side development consists of Java files, and amongst things, Servlets. Servlets are applications that catch server side the request from the client, process it, push it back through some JSP and then back to the client - these are what generate HTML etc.

The only thing is that in order to write this stuff, you need to set up the environment properly : your "server" requires an EAR file, which is just a folder, and within that you need a WAR file, which is just another folder, then within that you have a WEB-INF folder where you have your web.xml file that defines everything, then you have your source and classes folders where you have your source code and compiled code respectively. Any other content goes within the WAR folder which is in fact the root of the application, so if you put index.html into that folder it will display.

Good luck with that, been working in J2EE for 9 months now with a production application already live for a month (actually, received an award for it today) and I *still* don't understand all there is to do with setting up J2EEm let alone using it!!
 
Tomcat, JSP and Servlets don't have much to do with J2EE. Tomcat contains a JSP complier which complies JSP to java servlets.

Servlets are in java standard edition. You only need J2EE for stuff like Java Server Faces NOT Java Server Pages, it basically some extra libaries onto of the standard java.

Btw for the guy asking what tomcat is, it's basically a server for JSP files, which are just files which intermingle Java and HTML to make a dymanic web page, which then get complied down to pure Java Servlets, but thats transparent mostly.

It only gets complicated when you get application servers like JBoss.

Tomcat is not a J2EE application server.

JSP is PHP for java pretty much.
 
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