Table of Contents

About

Web application in Java.

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

An enterprise application may contain zero or more web applications.

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

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