Servlets and JavaServer Pages: The J2EE Technology Web Tier

Chapter 1. Setting Up a Servlet and JSP Environment

Before you start developing with Servlets and JavaServer Pages, you need to understand two very important things: Why is using the technology desirable, and what is needed in order to use the technology? This chapter answers these two questions, and in the process provides an introduction to the entire book. We start with an introduction to traditional Web development. The discussion describes why Servlets and JSP were initially created and why the technologies are currently popular. The end of the discussion segues to the software needed in order to run the book's examples.

It is preferred that you follow the instructions in this chapter to ensure your coding environment most closely matches the one all of the code examples of this book have been tested against. If you are using an already established Servlet/JSP environment, make sure it has support for JavaServer Pages 2.0, Servlets 2.4, and the Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4. Examples in this book require these technologies and some features covered are not backwards-compatible.

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