Developing web applications

Learn about selecting tools for developing web applications.

Before you begin

Design a web application and the required components.

There are two basic approaches to selecting tools for developing web applications:

You can use one of the available integrated development environments (IDEs). IDE tools automatically generate significant parts of the servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) code, and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files. They also contain integrated tools for packaging and testing the web application components.
If you decide to develop web components without an IDE, you need at least an ASCII text editor. You can also use tools available in the Java™ SE Development Kit 6 and in this product to assemble, test, and deploy the Web application components.

The following steps support the second approach, development without an IDE.

If necessary, migrate any pre-existing code to the required version of the servlet and JSP specification.
Write and compile the components of the web application.
To access classes that were extended, compile your code using the -classpath option on the javac compiler. This option allows you to reference the j2ee.jar file in the product directory:
- <install_root>\dev\JavaEE
- app_server_root/dev/JavaEE
To compile that same servlet on the Windows NT version of WebSphere® Network Deployment, specify:
```
javac -classpath D:\Program Files\WebSphere\DeploymentManager\dev\JavaEE\j2ee.jar MyServlet.java
```
To compile that same servlet on WebSphere Application Server for i5/OS, Network Deployment, specify:
```
javac -J-Djava.version=1.5 -classpath app_server_root/dev/JavaEE/j2ee.jar MyServlet.java 
```
Optionally disable JavaServer Pages (JSP) runtime compilation, if necessary.

Assemble the application components in one or more web modules.