TheNEXUS

A web application with a single JSP page and no configured servlets is next to useless. Let’s add a simple servlet to this application and make some changes to the pom.xml and web.xml to support this change. First, we’ll need to create a new package under src/main/java named org.sonatype.mavenbook.web:

$ mkdir -p src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web
$ cd src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web

Once you’ve created this package, change to the src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web directory and create a class named SimpleServlet in SimpleServlet.java, which contains the code shown in the SimpleServlet class:

SimpleServlet Class. 

package org.sonatype.mavenbook.web;

import java.io.*;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;

public class SimpleServlet extends HttpServlet {
    public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request,
                      HttpServletResponse response)
        throws ServletException, IOException {

        PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
        out.println( "SimpleServlet Executed" );
        out.flush();
        out.close();
    }
}

Our SimpleServlet class is just that: a servlet that prints a simple message to the response’s Writer. To add this servlet to your web application and map it to a request path, add the servlet and servlet-mapping elements shown in the following web.xml to your project’s web.xml file. The web.xml file can be found in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF.

Mapping the Simple Servlet. 

<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
          "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
          "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd" >

<web-app>
  <display-name>Archetype Created Web Application</display-name>
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>simple</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>
      org.sonatype.mavenbook.web.SimpleServlet
    </servlet-class>
  </servlet>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>simple</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/simple</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

Everything is in place to test this servlet; the class is in src/main/java and the web.xml has been updated. Before we launch the Jetty plugin, compile your project by running mvn compile:

~/examples/ch-simple-web/simple-webapp $ mvn compile
...
[INFO] [compiler:compile]
[INFO] Compiling 1 source file to \
~/examples/ch-simple-web/simple-webapp/target/classes
[INFO] -----------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] -----------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Compilation failure

/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web/SimpleServlet.java:[4,0] \
package javax.servlet does not exist

/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web/SimpleServlet.java:[5,0] \
package javax.servlet.http does not exist

/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web/SimpleServlet.java:[7,35] \
cannot find symbol
symbol: class HttpServlet
public class SimpleServlet extends HttpServlet {

/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web/SimpleServlet.java:[8,22] \
cannot find symbol
symbol  : class HttpServletRequest
location: class org.sonatype.mavenbook.web.SimpleServlet

/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web/SimpleServlet.java:[9,22] \
cannot find symbol
symbol  : class HttpServletResponse
location: class org.sonatype.mavenbook.web.SimpleServlet

/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/web/SimpleServlet.java:[10,15] \
cannot find symbol
symbol  : class ServletException
location: class org.sonatype.mavenbook.web.SimpleServlet

The compilation fails because your Maven project doesn’t have a dependency on the Servlet API. In the next section, we’ll add the Servlet API to this project’s POM.