i'm an idiot and need help

[Eric Johnson]

i'm using java 1.4.0. i downloaded servlet-2_3-fcs-classfiles.zip from the sun site. what do i do with it? unzipped it contains a javax folder, which in turn contains a servlet folder. i'm figuring this is what i need to put somewhere in my j2sdk1.4.0 folder. i put it in javax in the src.zip folder in j2sdk1.4.0, but no joy. i get import errors trying to compile servlets. i was using java 1.3 some time ago, and it was a breeze configuring servlets, at least that's the way i remember it. but i had to put java down for awhile. no i am learning and relearning. seems that it was easy to add new apis before, but i'll be durned if i can figure this out. can't find any install instructions on the sun site, i guess they assume you know what you're doing. sadly, it seems that i don't. please help!
[ July 05, 2002: Message edited by: Eric Johnson ]

[Dave Vick]

Eric
If you've already got the J2EE files hen the servlet classes are included in that downlaod and they are installed correctly just by installing the J2EE files properly. If all you want is the servlets files then I think you'll still need to set up the path and other environment variables the same as for the J2EE files.
I haven't done just the servlets classes so someone else might know better how to set it up. You're best bet would be to get the entire J2EE download and do it all at once so you have everything you might need in the future too.

[Eric Peterson]

Eric,
Depending upon what kind of box you are developing on Dave may be right in just telling you to download the entire J2EE api, but if you are like me and developing on an ancient Win 98 box then you could run into problems there.
Here are a couple of suggestions I can give you. If you want to compile servlets you need the proper .jar file in your classpath. If you are going to compile them though, you are probably going to want to test them and so you are going to need a good servlet engine. You can do a search on this forum for discussion on which are best and where to find them. A couple of good ones that I use are Tomcat and Resin. Either way you are going to be looking for a file called jsdk23.jar or servlet.jar or something like that. Place that file in your j2sdk1.4/bin directory and then make sure that file is in your classpath. There is a good tutorial that may be of some help to you.
The author of the tutorial has very good books on servlet/jsp development one of which is available here for free in pdf format. Hope this helps.
[ July 05, 2002: Message edited by: Eric Peterson ]

[Anthony Villanueva]

If you will write/run servlets you need a servlet engine like tomcat. It will have a servlet.jar already (containing all those javax.servlet.* and javax.servlet.http.* packages) so there is no need to download it from Sun. Just include this jar file in your favorite IDE's classpath. See your IDE's docs for setting classpaths.

[Eric Johnson]

thanx for all the help everyone. when i was doin this before i was using the java serverpages web development kit ver. 1.0.1. but some folks had told me that tomcat was better anyway. got it all goin on now though, so thanx again.