Dynamic Web Sites with XML, XSLT and JSP (2/4) - exploring XML

Software

As mentioned earlier, the basis for our approach is a JSP-enabled Web server. We use for our example the popular and easy to install Tomcat servlet engine, the successor of the well-known JServ engine in the Jakarta project. It provides, besides the servlet container, also a runtime environment for JSPs. The big advantage of Tomcat is that it can be operated in stand-alone mode and therefore as a full Web server as well as with dedicated Web servers such as Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server and Netscape Enterprise Server. Since Tomcat is written in Java, it requires a Java runtime version 1.1 or higher. To set it all up:

Download and install Java

Download Tomcat

Set TOMCAT_HOME and JAVA_HOME

Start Tomcat with startup.sh or startup.bat

Point your browser to the start page at http://localhost:8080

Create directories under TOMCAT_HOME/webapps:

xslt
xslt/xml
xslt/WEB-INF
xslt/WEB-INF/lib

Download Xalan

Unpack Xalan and drop xerces.jar, xalan.jar, and bsf.jar into xslt/WEB-INF/lib

Download Jakarta Taglib

Unpack Taglib and drop xsl.jar into xslt/WEB-INF/lib, xsl.tld into xslt/WEB-INF

Create xslt/WEB-INF/web.xml:

    	<taglib>
        <taglib-uri>http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/xsl-1.0</taglib-uri>
		<taglib-location>/WEB-INF/xsl.tld</taglib-location>
    	</taglib>

Restart Tomcat

An example follows.