Help running a simple jsp file,Tomcat 5.0.16

Question

Hi,
This question may be addressed many many times,but do reply.
I have a Win xp operating system
Installed Tomcat 5.0.16 in it.
Next the directory structure
PS : The sampleapp directory is outside the tomcat installation directory.
E:/sampleapp
| |
ROOT WEB-INF
|
classes
|
<package1><structure> .class files (for servlet works fine!!!!)
in the WEB-INF,there is the web.xml,then sourcefiles<dir> and the lib directory which is empty.
Now the servlet files work fine.........
I have placed my MyJsp.jsp file in the above mentioned ROOT directory.
I have not done any thing with the <TOMCAT_HOME>/conf/server.xml file
and the web.xml which I have written.
When I give the following URI
http://localhost:8080/sampleapp/MyJsp.jsp,
I get the HTTP status 404- /MyJsp.jsp
description: The requested resource (/MyJsp.jsp) is not available.
Hoping that I have defined the problem specifically.Kindly show some light on this.
Thanks
AS

Answer 1

Nevermind. I just found the answer. For the record, there are two ways in getting JSPs to work:
1. Precompiling the JSPs and modifying your webapp's web.xml file with the XML fragment generated in YourWebApp/web/WEB-INF/generated_web.xml;
2. Not precompiling the JSPs, but simply letting tomcat compile it on the fly on first access.
PRECOMPILATION METHOD
Go to http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/jasper-howto.html. Copy-and-paste the ant script under the section "Web Application Compilation" into a file called compile.xml. For me, I save it in ~/development/compile.xml. Then compile the JSPs using the command (all in a single line):
$ANT_HOME/ant -file <PATH_TO_COMPILE.XML> -Dtomcat.home=<$TOMCAT_HOME> -Dwebapp.path=<$WEBAPP_PATH>
In my case, I cd into the directory where my app resides:
cd ~/development/HelloWorld
and then I type:
ant -file ~/development/compile.xml -Dtomcat.home=/var/tomcat5 -Dwebapp.path=.
(Note the trailing dot since my current directory is my webapp's directory itself. Also, in my case, my shell's PATH contains the path to the ant executable, so I just type 'ant' directly.)
Open the file ~/development/HelloWorld/web/WEB-INF/generated_web.xml and follow the instructions in that auto-generated file, which is: "Place this fragment in the web.xml before all icon, display-name, description, distributable, and context-param elements."
The web.xml referred to above is YOUR web.xml. In my case, it is the one in ~/development/HelloWorld/web/WEB-INF/web.xml
When ready to deploy, type:
ant dist
as usual. Deploy the .war file in the dist directory as you normally would. In my case, I do:
rm -rf $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/hello* (removes my HelloWorld webapp directory and its war file)
cp ~/development/HelloWorld/dist/hello.war $CATALINA_HOME/webapps
and wait for tomcat to unravel the war file. I can then access the JSP page based on whatever the generated_web.xml had specified. In my case, it would be http://localhost:8080/hello/sample.jsp
NON-PRECOMPILATION METHOD
Copy tools.jar from the Java JDK into tomcat's common/lib. (I found this only in the error message in tomcat's log file!! Didn't find it anywhere else!!). Do this one time only, then restart tomcat:
cp $JAVA_HOME/lib/tools.jar $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib
Restart tomcat.
Deploy your webapp as usual which will include your JSP files stored under your webapp's 'web' directory. No precompilation of JSPs is required. Then access your JSP pages such as http://localhost:8080/HelloWorld/my-jsp-page.jsp and tomcat will compile it on the fly on first access. The disadvantage is that there will be a slight delay on first access.
[Note:  I am putting all this down for the record, because it took me MANY HOURS to figure all this out as the info on how to do this is not found clearly in one place!!  Hope this helps others.]
My next step is to incorporate the contents of compile.xml as mentioned above, into my regular build.xml file.