Today's Task: Explain Just Copy My War File Into Your Webapps Folder

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:09:47 GMT

My contention is that you can't explain "just copy my war file into your webapps folder" without

first training him into a Java developer
and then teaching him the full Servlet Specification
and then showing him how a war file is really a jar file in disguise
and then how a jar file is nothing but a zip file
and that a zip file is sort of like a directory
and that the webapps folder is inside your servlet container
and that the servlet container will unzip your war file and put the result into a directory whose name is the same as the war file without the war extension
and that that directory name is really your context
and that the context is really something that you put at the end of your URL

In other words, forget about it.

Weiqi Gao's Observations - servlets tag