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Installing Web Applications

A context is a name that gets mapped to a Web application. For example, the context of the Hello1 application is /hello1. To install an application to Tomcat, you notify Tomcat that a new context is available.

You notify Tomcat of a new context with the Ant install task. Note that an installed application is not available after Tomcat is restarted. To permanently deploy an application, see Deploying Web Applications.

The Ant install task tells the manager running at the location specified by the url attribute to install an application at the context specified by the path attribute and the location containing the Web application files specified with the war attribute. The value of the war attribute can be a WAR file jar:file:/path/to/bar.war!/ or an unpacked directory file:/path/to/foo.

<install url="url" path="mywebapp" war="file:build"
  username="username" password="password" />
 

The username and password attributes are discussed in Tomat Web Application Manager.

Instead of providing a war attribute, you can specify configuration information with the config attribute:

<install url="url" 
  path="mywebapp" config="file:build/context.xml"
  username="username" password="password"/>
 

The config attribute points to a configuration file that contains a context entry of the form:

<Context path="/bookstore1"
  docBase="../docs/tutorial/examples/web/bookstore1/build"
  debug="0">
 

Note that the context entry implicitly specifies the location of the Web application files through its docBase attribute.

The tutorial example build files contain an Ant install target that invokes the Ant install task:

<target name="install" 
  description="Install web application" depends="build">
  <install url="${url}" path="${mywebapp}"
    config="file:build/context.xml"
    username="${username}" password="${password}"/>
</target>
 

The Ant install task requires that a Web application deployment descriptor (web.xml) be available. All of the tutorial example applications are distributed with a deployment descriptor.

To install the Hello1 application described in Web Application Life Cycle

1. In a terminal window, go to <JWSDP_HOME>/docs/tutorial/examples/web/hello1.
2. Make sure Tomcat is started.
3. Execute ant install. The install target notifies Tomcat that the new context is available.

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This tutorial contains information on the 1.0 version of the Java Web Services Developer Pack.

All of the material in The Java Web Services Tutorial is copyright-protected and may not be published in other works without express written permission from Sun Microsystems.