Question

I want to install and use java on a linux server. specifically, for creating large web applications, so I want to use JavaServer pages technology

My question: is this possible?

and how do I get started?

thanks,
av

Answer 1

Yes, absolutely.

Tomcat is what you need. It’s an open source servlet container that supports JSP (Java Server Pages) and it works fine on Linux. It’s very stable and sustains very high throughput.

I can tell you first from first hand experience that some surprisingly large companies with a lot of daily traffic use Java, Linux, and Tomcat to build their webapps.

EDIT: So, if all you are interested in is JSP, Tomcat is the place to go. For large Java webapps, some other standard technologies get used. Based on your question, these may be more than you are looking for now, but just in case….

• Apache HTTP Webserver – Can provide
  some caching, load balancing, and
  HTTPS termination.
• Hibernate – Database relational mapping
• Spring – Dependency Injection and
  configuration, among other things.
• Struts or Spring MVC – Web App
  framework
• Velocity or Freemarker –
  Alternatives to JSP for templating
• Memcached – Distributed caching.

These are some of the other larger moving parts. All free, open source, and work very well on linux. There are tons of smaller parts that I haven’t mentioned.