Slapping Together A JSP Development Environment - Putting It In Context (
Page 6 of 7 )
The default Tomcat
installation comes with a folder named "webapps", which contains sample files.
You can place your JSP documents here, or you can define new locations from
which to serve JSP files. In Tomcat-lingo, these locations are known as
"contexts", and they're defined in the "server.xml" file in the Tomcat CONF
directory.
Let's suppose that you wanted to serve files from the location
http://localhost/jsp/, The first thing to do is to define a context in the
Tomcat "server.xml" configuration file.
<Context path="/jsp" docBase="webapps/jsp/" debug="0" reloadable="true">
</Context>
This maps the location /jsp to the "webapps/jsp"
folder.
Next, create a directory named "jsp" in the "webapps" folder,
place the "hello.jsp" script there, and restart Tomcat and Apache. You should
see the new context when Tomcat starts up.
Context log: path="/examples" Adding context path="/examples"
docBase="webapps/examples"
Context log: path="/test" Adding context path="/test"
docBase="webapps/test"
Context log: path="/jsp" Adding context path="/jsp" docBase="webapps/jsp/"
Now, when you point your browser to the URL
http://localhost/jsp/hello.jsp, you should see the file being rendered
correctly.
You can add as many contexts as you like, using the format
above - however, these will always be one level below the server's document
root. If you'd like to run JSP files from the document root itself, you should
place them in the "webapps/ROOT" folder. For example, if the file "hello.jsp"
was located in "webapps/ROOT", I would be able to access it via the URL
http://localhost/hello.jsp.
If you're really picky, you can define an
alternate location for the root folder by creating a new context - as the
following example demonstrates:
<Context path="/" docBase="webapps/my/new/server/root" debug="0"
reloadable="true" >
</Context>
For more information on contexts, and how to tweak them
for maximum performance, take a look at the Tomcat User Guide at
http://jakarta.apache.org/
