lang:java:web_application

About

A Java web application serve and/or generates interactive HTML web pages.

An enterprise application may contain zero or more web applications.

Articles Related

Format

War

A web application is generally deliverd as a war file (Web Archive). It's JAR files renamed to a .war (web archive) extension.

The deployment unit is an archive file containing all files.

Archive files are typically created by using the jar utility or Ant's jar tool. See Java - Packaging, Archive, Library (JAR, WAR, EAR File)

Content

The war file is a hierarchical set of folders with:

Java classes and jar files
static files, (HTML, JavaScript, image, files and resources)
directories,
web component (servlet class files, jsp, jsf) for the front end / presentation layer
JavaBeans for the business logic layer
ressource, such as image files
An application configuration resource file, which configures application resources
An set of tag library descriptor files (for Jsf Application)
and deployment_descriptor

Deployment Descriptor

XML Deployment Descriptors

J2EE (Default mandatory) - WEB-INF/web.xml

And a web app server descriptor to at minimum defined the context root

WebLogic - WEB-INF/weblogic.xml

See Java - Deployment descriptors (Metadata)

Files

A War is a special JAR file with special treatment for files that should end up in the :

WEB-INF/lib,
WEB-INF/classes
or WEB-INF directories

Example

For example, a Java Server Faces web application WAR file using Facelets typically has the following directory structure:

myWebApp/
  WEB-INF/
    web.xml
    weblogic.xml
    lib/
      MyLib.jar
    classes/
      MyPackage/
        MyServlet.class
  index.html
  index.jsp

Management

create

Zie Java - Packaging, Archive, Library (JAR, WAR, EAR File)

jar cvf myWar.war myApp

Table of Contents

Java - Web Application (Web Module) - War