Beyond code

I started working on a small webapp this weekend, something that might some day become public, but who knows ;). Anyways here are some notes and examples of using maven to create a webapp, (un)deploying it to a running tomcat instance and using JSTL 1.1 in it.

First, lets create the standard layout to work with in maven, we can use the webapp archetype for this:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.credmp \
                     -DartifactId=my-app \
                     -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp

This will create the necessary structure and a simple startup webapplication. Now I want to be able to deploy it to an running tomcat instance without too much hassle; cargo to the rescue!

    <build>
        <finalName>my-app</finalName>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
                <artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <container>
                        <containerId>tomcat5x</containerId>
                        <type>remote</type>
                    </container>
                    <configuration>
                        <type>runtime</type>
                        <properties>
                            <cargo.hostname>localhost</cargo.hostname>
                            <cargo.servlet.port>8080</cargo.servlet.port>
                            <cargo.remote.username>tomcat</cargo.remote.username>
                            <cargo.remote.password>tomcat</cargo.remote.password>
                        </properties>
                    </configuration>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

Cool, we can now run ‘mvn cargo:deploy’ and the built artifact will be deployed to a running instance. Right, now what? Well, I want to use JSTL 1.1 and some other things that are usefull in webapplications. First thing is to bring the web.xml up to date to version 2.4.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
                             http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"
         version="2.4">
</web-app>

And lets also add the necessary jars to the pom so that they are built / used automatically.

        <dependency>
          <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
          <artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
          <version>1.1.2</version>
          <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
          <groupId>taglibs</groupId>
          <artifactId>standard</artifactId>
          <version>1.1.2</version>
          <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>

We need the standard taglibs to be able to use JSTL taglib in the jsps.

<%@ taglib prefix='c' uri='http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core' %>

Cool, we now have the basis to build a proper webapplication with a proper build system. For more configuration options for the cargo-maven2-plugin see the documentation.

Arjen Code