Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems. Personal use only; do not redistribute.

14

Chapter 1 Overview of Servlets and JavaServer Pages

servlets and JSP. For a free trial version, see 

http://www.sun.com/software/jwebserver/try/

. For a 

free non expiring version for teaching purposes at academic 

institutions, see 

http://freeware.thesphere.com/

.

Bookmark or Install the Servlet and JSP API 

Documentation

Just as no serious programmer should develop general purpose Java applica 

tions without access to the JDK 1.1 or 1.2 API documentation, no serious pro 

grammer should develop servlets or JSP pages without access to the API for

classes in the 

javax.servlet

 packages. Here is a summary of where to find

the API:

http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/download.html

This site lets you download either the 2.1/1.0 API or the 2.2/1.1 

API to your local system. You may have to download the entire 

reference implementation and then extract the documentation.

http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/2.2/javadoc/

This site lets you browse the servlet 2.2 API on line.

http://www.java.sun.com/j2ee/j2sdkee/techdocs/api/

This address lets you browse the complete API for the Java 2 

Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which includes the servlet 

2.2 and JSP 1.1 packages.

If Sun or Apache place any new additions on line (e.g., a place to browse

the 2.1/1.0 API), they will be listed under Chapter 1 in the book source

archive at 

http://www.coreservlets.com/

.

Identify the Classes to the Java Compiler

Once you've obtained the necessary software, you need to tell the Java com 

piler (

javac

) where to find the servlet and JSP class files when it compiles

your servlets. Check the documentation of your particular package for defini 

tive details, but the necessary class files are usually in the 

lib

 subdirectory of

the server's installation directory, with the servlet classes in 

servlet.jar

 and

the JSP classes in 

jsp.jar

, 

jspengine.jar

, or 

jasper.jar

. There are a

couple of different ways to tell 

javac

 about these classes, the easiest of which

is to put the JAR files in your 

CLASSPATH

. If you've never dealt with the

CLASSPATH

 before, it is the variable that specifies where 

javac

 looks for

Second edition of this book: www.coreservlets.com; Sequel: www.moreservlets.com.

Servlet and JSP training courses by book's author: courses.coreservlets.com.