Originally posted by Sam Smoot:
I am trying to understand how JSP's (and Servlets) are published for use on a server. I gather they need to be compiled on the host to run as long as the host supports them and they can't just be compiled at the developer's level and then loaded directly to the server... correct? If so, what about external classes for the JSP / servlet?
That's one of the major points of
java "Write once, run (almost) anywhere" -- so you can compile your Servlets and pre-compile your JSPs on a developer's machine and then move them to a production environment.
Quite often in the JSP/Servlet environment you create a Web Application Archive (WAR file) it compromises all the parts of your application and holds them in the .zip format. You can then deploy this single file on to your application server (nice and convenient that way).
Check out
More Servlets and JavaServer Pages by Marty Hall. Or you can check out
Chapter 4 of the HP Application Server Developer's Guide. It covers Web Components (JSPs and Servlets) as well as WAR files. That section is relativly application-server neutral.
Hope that helps!