Packing our web application into a war

As mentioned before, to deploy our web application, we need to pack it into a war file.

We do this with the Ant "war" task.

Update your Ant build.xml 'dist' target as shown below:

 <project name="HelloWorld" xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" >  
     
   <target name="resolve" description="--> retrieve dependencies with ivy">  
     <ivy:retrieve />  
   </target>  
   
      <target name="init" depends="resolve">  
           <mkdir dir="classes"/>  
           <mkdir dir="target"/>  
      </target>  
   
      <target name="compile" depends="init">  
           <javac srcdir="." destdir="classes">  
                <classpath>  
                 <pathelement location="lib/servlet-api-2.5.jar"/>  
                </classpath>  
           </javac>  
      </target>  
   
      <target name="dist" depends="compile">  
           <war destfile="target/HelloWorld.war" webxml="web.xml">  
                 <classes dir="classes"/>  
                 <lib dir="lib"/>  
           </war>  
      </target>  
 </project>  

In the war task, we tell Ant to build a HeloWorld.war, and we tell it where to get the web.xml, the classes and the lib folders.

Ant will automatically create a WEB-INF directory from this information.

So now if you run the Ant:dist target, you will see a HelloWorld.war in your /target