Testing the server involves two steps:
- Verifying that the server can even start.
- Checking that you can access your own HTML and JSP pages.
Before trying your own servlets or JSP pages, you should make sure that the server is
installed and configured properly. For Tomcat, click on install_dir/bin/startup.bat
(or execute install_dir/bin/startup.sh on Unix/Linux).
Next, enter the URL
http://localhost/ in your browser and make sure you get
the Tomcat welcome page, not an
error message saying that the page cannot be displayed or that the server cannot be
found. If you chose not to change the
port number to 80 as described above,
you will need to use a URL like http://localhost:8080/ that includes the
port number.
To halt the server, double click on install_dir/bin/shutdown.bat.
I recommend that you make shortcuts to (not copies of) the
startup and shutdown scripts and place those shortcuts on the desktop or in
your main development directory. If you use an IDE, you'll have to tell
it where these scripts are.
After you have verified that the server is running, you should make sure that you can
install and access simple HTML and JSP pages. This test, if successful, shows two
important things. First, successfully accessing an HTML page shows that you understand
which directories should hold HTML and JSP files. Second, successfully
accessing a new JSP page shows that the Java compiler (not just the Java virtual
machine) is configured properly.
Eventually, you will almost certainly want to create and use your own Web applications
(see Chapter 4 of
More Servlets and JavaServer Pages), but for initial testing
I recommend that you use the default Web application.
Although Web applications follow a common directory structure,
the exact location of the default Web application is server specific.
With Tomcat 4 and the default Web application, you put HTML and JSP pages in
install_dir/webapps/ROOT
or install_dir/webapps/ROOT/SomePath and
access them with
http://localhost/filename or
http://localhost/SomePath/filename. Note that
Tomcat creates install_dir/webapps/ROOT when the
server is first run. So, you must start the server as
described above before trying
to access the directory.
For your first tests, I suggest you simply take
Hello.html
and Hello.jsp
and drop them into the appropriate locations. Right click on the links
to download these two files to your system.
The code for these files, as well as all the code from the book, is available online
at http://www.moreservlets.com.
That Web site also contains book updates, additions, information
on servlet and JSP short courses, and the full text of
Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages (in PDF).
If you put the files in the top-level directory of the
default Web application (i.e., in install_dir/webapps/ROOT),
access them with the URLs
http://localhost/Hello.html and http://localhost/Hello.jsp,
respectively. If you put them in a subdirectory of install_dir/webapps/ROOT,
use the URLs http://localhost/directoryName/Hello.html and
http://localhost/directoryName/Hello.jsp, respectively.
If neither the HTML file nor the JSP file works (e.g., you get File Not
Found--404--errors), you likely are using the wrong directory for the files. If the
HTML file works but the JSP file fails, you probably have incorrectly specified the
base JDK directory (e.g., with the JAVA_HOME variable).
Reprinted with permission from
Marty Hall. This tutorial is also available at
http://www.moreservlets.com/Using-Tomcat-4.html
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