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1.5 Installation and Setup

15

classes when compiling. If the variable is unspecified, 

javac

 looks in the cur 

rent directory and the standard system libraries. If you set 

CLASSPATH

 your 

self, be sure to include  

.

 , signifying the current directory. 

Following is a brief summary of how to set the environment variable on a

couple of different platforms. Assume 

dir

 is the directory in which the serv 

let and JSP classes are found.

Unix (C Shell)

setenv CLASSPATH .:dir/servlet.jar:dir/jspengine.jar

Add 

:$CLASSPATH

 to the end of the 

setenv

 line if your 

CLASSPATH

 is

already set and you want to add more to it, not replace it. Note that on Unix

systems you use forward slashes to separate directories within an entry and

colons to separate entries, whereas you use backward slashes and semicolons

on Windows. To make this setting permanent, you would typically put this

statement in your 

.cshrc

 file. 

Windows

set CLASSPATH=.;dir\servlet.jar;dir\jspengine.jar

Add 

;%CLASSPATH%

 to the end of the above line if your 

CLASSPATH

 is

already set and you want to add more to it, not replace it. Note that on Win 

dows you use backward slashes to separate directories within an entry and

semicolons to separate entries, while you use forward slashes and colons on

Unix. To make this setting permanent on Windows 95/98, you'd typically put

this statement in your 

autoexec.bat

 file. On Windows NT or 2000, you

would go to the Start menu, select Settings, select Control Panel, select Sys 

tem, select Environment, then enter the variable and value. 

Package the Classes

As you'll see in the next chapter, you probably want to put your servlets into

packages to avoid name conflicts with servlets other people write for the

same Web or application server. In that case, you may find it convenient to

add the top level directory of your package hierarchy to the 

CLASSPATH

 as

well. See Section 2.4 (Packaging Servlets) for details. 

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

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