Blending webapps with HTML files

[David Wall]

I'm new to Tomcat 3.2.1 and Servlet 2.2 in particular, having just come from JRun before webapps made their debut.   I'm struggling with the "best practices" people are using for storing their JSPs and Java class files in the webapps directory, while storing images and html files in the web server directory root.   For example, in Apache 1.3.14, my document root is htdocs and I am putting some files there for serving by apache, like:   htdocs/images/a.gif htdocs/images/b.gif htdocs/index.jsp     <-- empty dummy file workaround so that Apache will send a request for "/" to Tomcat's ROOT index.jsp htdocs/app.js htdocs/app.css etc...   And in my webapps under Tomcat I have:   webapps/ROOT/index.jsp    <-- the actual index.jsp served up when I enter "/" for apache webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/   (all of my class files needed just by the index.jsp file) webapps/pub/index.jsp webapps/pub/company.jsp webapps/pub/news.jsp webapps/pub/WEB-INF/classes/   (all the class files needed by 'pub' application, even though they are the same as those for ROOT).   My questions are:   1) This separation of the JSP files from stuff like images, javascripts, stylesheets when deployed seems like a pain since they need to be in the same directory when I'm using my editing tools (like Dreamweaver).  Only when I deploy do I need to move the static files to the apache locations and the JSPs to the Tomcat webapps area.  Don't others find this to be a pain, or I am just not doing it right?   2) The ROOT and pub applications are really not distinct applications, only a separation of JSPs and such from the root to a public directory.  I had this subdirectory structure back before webapps, and they were done to organize the JSPs into logical groups like how all HTML sites are done.  They are not put into separate subdirectories because they are separate webapps.  Can a single webapp support multiple directories, or at least a directory and all subdirectories?  Perhaps ROOT is just abnormal because everybody wants a page to be displayed when they enter your URL like http://myeastside.com/   3) When Java classes are shared by several webapps, they have to appear in each of the webapps' WEB-INF/classes directories.  Is that what people are doing, or are they JARing them up and then putting them in a common location (like Tomcat's 'lib') to be shared by all?   Any thoughts will help.  The separation forced by the webapps concept seems broken to me since it seems unlikely that web servers and their standard document root processing is not going to go away anytime soon (we still have PHP, CGI, images, etc. besides JSPs).   David