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Originally published at Internet.com"Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest art of all the arts."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Review Part 1
Review Part 2
In this installment, we discuss issues of deployment and distribution. We are continuing to use the build.xml file from a real, working Web application - please download it and follow along.
Deploying Locally
These days, it is trivial to run a servlet container on your workstation. This should be your first line of deployment. Before you push your application to any other servers, you should deploy it locally and look it over. (It is also a good idea to run acceptance tests on the locally running site, using a test framework like HTTPUnit.)
A Web application is just a bunch of files in a directory. At its heart, deployment is simply a matter of copying those files to the right place and letting your servlet container know that you've done so.
In the case of a local servlet container, the first step - copying the files - is already done! Remember, our webapp target created a directory inside of build that contains all the files of the Web application. All we need to do now is tell our servlet container where these files are. For Tomcat, that's as easy as adding a single line to TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml:
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