Part 2: Creating an initial web.xml file for the new application. 

The  web.xml file is the Web Application Deployment Descriptor. This file defines all 

information that the server needs to know to run the Web application. The definition of the 

Descriptor is part of the Servlet API Specification, V2.2. The Apache Software Foundation 

provides a basic web.xml file within the Tomcat application development guide. Please 

download this file, and place it in your local source code directory under etc/. Then, add the 

file to the repository with the commands given below. As long as you have not created any 

new servlets, no modifications should be necessary to the provided web.xml file. However, 

the web.xml file contains a few small bugs that must be taken care of (as of the writing of 

this on April 30, 2001   I am assuming they will still be there): 

o Line 77: The description text contains an XML tag  that is 

recognized by Tomcat, but should not be right here. Just remove the <> symbols. 

o Line 88 and 92: The end tags are wrong. Instead of , it should be 

Note: The example web.xml file contains a lot of information that is not required initially. 

Nevertheless, it is very useful to have an example that contains many of the available tags 

for reference.  

After correcting the mistakes mentioned above, you should add the file to the repository. 

$ cd ~/myApp/etc

$ cvs add web.xml

$ cvs commit  m "Initial web.xml file added."

This concludes the set up and configuration of the development environment. In the next 

section, the author will demonstrate the development and deployment of a simple application 

containing one HTML page and one servlet, and look at the structure of the deployed 

application in further detail. 

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