Java Web Books - Eclipse

Java Web Books - Eclipse
— print (last updated: Oct 21, 2009) — print

The following WAR file can be used to install the WebBooks application (see Java Web Books) into Eclipse. Click to download:

WebBooks.war

Assuming that you have done the basic setup work described in Java Web Projects in Eclipse, open Eclipse and install WebBooks as follows:

Right-click on the Projects window and select Import WAR file.
Click the Browse button, navigate to the location of WebBooks.war, select it, OK, then Finish.

At this point, I cannot seem to find the exact right method to run the application without errors, but it combines these actions, which, if done repeatedly back and forth will eventually run the application:

From the Servers tab, Start or Restart the tomcat server.
Select the WebBooks in Projects, click the Green Run button and select Run on Server.

Once you get it running, it's important to inspect the contents of the application to see the parts:

WebContent contains the JSP files, the js and css folders along with the standard WEB-INF and META-INF folders.
src contains the Hiberate configuration files, the models, servlet and util packages.

WEB-INF contains web.xml and the all-important lib directory which contains the JAR files relevant to this application:

Hibernate essentials:
  antlr-2.7.6.jar
  commons-collections-3.2.1.jar
  dom4j-1.6.1.jar
  hibernate-core-3.3.1.GA.jar
  javassist-3.9.0.GA.jar
  jta-1.1.jar
  slf4j-api-1.5.8.jar
  slf4j-simple-1.5.8.jar
Commons/Lang:
  commons-lang-2.4.jar
MySQL JDBC Driver:
  mysql-connector-java-5.1.10-bin.jar

The Libraries psuedo-folder represents all the JAR files used to run the application, including:
- Apache Tomcat V6.0 (JAR files in apache-tomcat-6.0.20/lib)
- JRE System Library: (JAR files from runtime environment)
- Web App Libraries: repeat listing of the JAR files in WEB-INF/lib

What is the WAR file?

A WAR file is nothing mysterious, it is simply a JAR file (which is a ZIP file) with web-related information. One can "see" what's contained within using either the Java jar utility or the unzip utility:

$ jar tf WebBooks.war       (change "tf" to "xf" to extract)

$ unzip -t WebBooks.war     (take away the "-t" to extract)

Adding further JAR files to an Eclipse project

There are probably several ways to make JAR files available to an Eclipse project, but the simplest is to add them directly into the folder:

WebContent/WEB-INF/lib

Do so as follows:

Right-click on this folder in Projects and select Import.
In the Choose import source window, select General File System.
In the File system window, Browse to the folder containing (some of) the Jars you want to add. They look grayed-out, but don't worry. Click OK.
Now you should see a listing of the JAR files in the right-hand side and the folder on the left. Click the individual choices or the entire folder. Then click Finish.

The NetBeans equivalent

NetBeans makes it rather easy to add JAR functionality through its Library mechanism. An equivalent approach would be to copy these libraries to your Java library directory and add these as individual JAR files to your project.