The joy of deploying Servlets

There are several ways to put data on the screen:

1) Console: a 40×80 grid of characters, input from keyboard, program launches on program execution.

2) Windows: with mouse and keyboard, input from a variety of controls, especially text boxes and buttons, program launches on events

3) Web server: HTML pages generated by servets, input from HTML forms, program launches when browser requests page

Console is easy, but not exciting.

Windows take forever to put together a simple form.

Web servers are a pain to deploy, for example:

- Write servlet (exetend HtttpServlet & override doGet)

- Write jps pages

- Write static pages

- In JBuilder, set project properties, set up a folder pointing at serlvet.jar

- Compile

- Create tags for web application in server.xml

- Create folder structure \webapps\YourApp\WEB-INF\Classes\package- Put files of package named ‘package’ into folder named ‘package’

- Figure out name of page, eg.

http://localhost:8080/YourApp/servlet/servlettest.myServlet

- Create an alias for a friendlier URL

- Put servlet into JAR

It’s no wonder that Java programmers get so excited about a tool like ANT.