WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Web Applications

Many of today’s enterprise applications implement a web frontend. They choose to expose their business functions via a web user interface, most often accessed from the client’s browser. These applications may access other enterprise services such as XML transformers, JNDI, database resources, and connection factories to fulfill their service contracts. WebLogic Server provides the ideal environment for creating rich web applications — it offers an extensive range of tools for assembling and configuring web components. Like any servlet engine, WebLogic supports all the functionality needed to host multiple web applications, which we shall cover in detail in later chapters.

In this chapter, we look at the internal structure of web applications and their associated XML deployment descriptors. We shall see how WebLogic eases the task of building and assembling web applications, and examine some of the deployment issues of WebLogic Server. We also look at how you can configure the various web components.

We take a peek at WebLogic’s JSP compiler, and then examine JSP configuration issues when deploying a web application. Custom JSP tags are a useful mechanism for adding dynamic content to a JSP page. WebLogic provides a number of tag libraries. One such tag library offers useful caching functionality. Similar caching functionality is made available in the form of a servlet filter. WebLogic also provides a tool that can automatically create a JSP tag library ...