Web Applications |
Active Web |
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Web Applications |
Active Web |
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A web application consists of a collection of static and dynamic resources that combine to produce an application accessed from a web browser.
The static content may consist of a variety of markup language (html, xml etc…) and images such as jpg. The dynamic content may consist of servlets (Active Web is a servlet).
A web application is deployed in a Web Application Container. The container provides access to the application via standard interfaces, and it also gives the application access to local resources via standard interfaces.
Web application containers are sometimes confused with web servers. Whilst a web application container may provide all the facilities that a web server does, it does provide a lot more. In addition to serving static and dynamic pages, the web application container also provides a way of encapsulating the web application in its own world, so that it cannot interfere with other web applications.
Deploying a web application is container specific. In some cases it can be as simple as putting your application WAR file (see Web Application Packaging for an explanation of WAR files) into a specific directory of the local file system (this is the case with Apache Tomcat) or it could require the use of the containers administration tool to upload the WAR file into the container. In either case the application is deployed in what is typically known as a context path.
For example, if you have a stock control application in stockcontrol.war and you deploy it in a context path of /stockcontrol then to access the main index page of the application you would use a URL similar to http://machine/stockcontrol/index.html. In this case index.html would be an html file at the root of the web application archive. In fact all page access into the stock control application would include /stockcontrol as the first part of the requested URL.
Topic ID: 150138