WAR Packaging

Target Audience and Content

The target audience for this guide is the Web component provider, i.e. the person in charge of developing the web components on the server side. It describes how the web components should be packaged.

The content of this guide is the following:

  1. Target Audience and Content
  2. Principles

Principles

Web components are packaged for deployment in a standard Java programming language Archive file, called a war file (Web ARchive), which is a jar similar to the package used for Java class libraries. A war has a specific hierarchical directory structure. The top-level directory of a war is the document root of the application.

The document root is where JSP pages, client-side classes and archives, and static web resources are stored. The document root contains a subdirectory called WEB-INF, which contains the following files and directories:

Example

To build a war file, the java source files should have been compiled to obtain the class files (located in the WEB-INF/classes directory) and the two XML deployment descriptors should have been written.

Then, the war file (<web-application>.war) is built, using the jar command:

    cd <your_webapp_directory>
    jar cvf <web-application>.war *