3.2  Introduction to Web Application Development with Tomcat 

The Apache Software Foundation has published an excellent guide on application development 

under Tomcat at 

http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/jakarta tomcat/src/doc/appdev/

. The author 

strongly recommends basing a new development environment on the instructions provided by 

this document. This Section provides a brief summary of the key ideas of Apache's application 

development guide, some additional comments for clarification, and a detailed example for 

creating a simple application, which can serve as a starting point for more complex tasks. 

Important note: Depending on your user account settings on the system you are using, you 

might need to have Linux super user (administrator) rights to write to directories that are not 

inside your local user home directory. You may also require logging in as a super user to 

configure the Tomcat servlet engine, or to start and stop it during development. If you are not 

familiar with the access rights and user management on your Linux system, please contact your 

system administrator. The system administrator may also wish to grant you the required 

permissions explicitly by providing the appropriate sudo commands. 

3.2.1  Creating the Source Code Repository 

The source code should be kept separate from the compiled version of the application. Source 

code control is easier if the directories contain only source files, and it is much more convenient 

to make an installable distribution of the application. The Apache Software Foundation 

recommends a directory hierarchy for source files, which is shown in Figure 5. 

Using the recommended directory structure also has the advantage that a provided build script 

may be used without major modifications, which can create a compiled Web application from 

the source tree with just one shell command. 

Before creating the source repository with the Concurrent Versions System, CVS needs to be 

configured according to the access levels required. CVS repositories can be configured for 

single users, user groups on the same server, or for multiple users on many client machines 

using remote access over a network or the Internet. Described here is the configuration for a 

user group accessing the repository from a single server. Please see Section 3.2.5 for 

references on how to set up CVS for the other cases. 

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