Developing Web applications

Web application development is primarily a feature of JBuilder Enterprise. Some Web development features are also available in JBuilder Professional.

This section discusses several technologies for developing Web-based multi-tier applications. A Web application is a collection of HTML/XML documents, Web components (servlets and JSPs), and other resources in either a directory structure or archived format known as a Web ARchive (WAR) file. A Web application is located on a central server and provides service to a variety of clients.

Sun Microsystems has delivered the latest versions of JavaServer PagesTM (JSP) and Servlets source code to the Apache Software Foundation http://www.apache.org to be developed and released under the Apache development process as the official JSP 1.1/Servlets 2.2 reference implementation. Apache, Sun, and a variety of other companies and individuals are openly developing a robust Reference Implementation that is freely available to any company or individual. This reference implementation, developed under the project name Jakarta and code-named Tomcat, will be the only reference implementation available. This implementation is available to any company or developer to be used in Web servers, development tools, and to create dynamic, interactive Web sites. JBuilder delivers Tomcat "in the box" to use as your Web server so that you can successfully develop and test your JSPs and Servlets within the JBuilder development environment.

The following technologies are discussed in this section:

JSPs or Servlets?

Both JSPs and Servlets technology have merits. How do you decide which to use in a given situation?

JSP pages are compiled into Servlets, so theoretically you could write Servlets to support your web-based applications. However, JSP technology was designed to simplify the process of creating pages by separating web presentation from web content. In many applications, the response sent to the client is a combination of template data and dynamically-generated data. In this situation, it is much easier to work with JSP pages than to do everything with Servlets.