How to deploy servlets to a share Tomcat instance?

Question

I've created a servlet app using Netbeans and it works on my local machine. Now I need to deploy the app to my college class Tomcat 6 instance. The instance is set up like so: /java/tomcat/webapps/<student_id>, where student_id are the 30 student IDs for my class.

What exactly do I need to deploy to /java/tomcat/webapps/elvin in order to get my servlets to work? I don't have root access to this machine and I can only write to /java/tomcat/webapps/elvin.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Easiest would be to let Netbeans create/build a WAR file (there should be one in project's /dist folder) and then extract it locally using some ZIP tool and finally copy the extracted contents unchanged into /webapps/elvin.

Several things to check:

• Servlet classes should go in a package. Packageless servlets will fail in certain configurations. Java classes should go in a package anyway.
• The Servlet version as declared in web.xml must be supported by Tomcat version in question.
  • Tomcat 7.0 supports max Servlet 3.0
  • Tomcat 6.0 supports max Servlet 2.5
  • Tomcat 5.5 supports max Servlet 2.4
  • Tomcat 5.0 supports max Servlet 2.3.