In order to run you first Servlet program, you need to make sure that you have installed Java in your system. For those of you, who
have not yet installed Java, please go through our article explaining step-by-step about how to download and install Java Development Kit(JDK) ,
a must before you want to execute your first Servlet program.
For those who have already installed Java, next we need to install a web server, a software required to run Servlet programs. There
are number of web servers available in the market and we will install the Servlet standard - Apache Tomcat Server.
Apache Tomcat server is the standard throughout the Servlet world. It is often referred to as Tomcat Server, an open-source Java Servlet Container developed by the Apache Software Foundation.
At the time of writing this article, the most recent version of Tomcat web server is 9.0, which is available at -
Apache Tomcat Website
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Our system is 64-Bit Windows Operating System, hence we have clicked the option 64-bit Windows zip, which will
download the compressed .zip form of Tomcat web server, but if you have 32-Bit Windows Operating System, you would need
to click on 32-bit Windows zip option(please look at the figure below).
As soon as you click on the version of Tomcat Server that you wish to install, a new window will pop-up on your screen, asking you Save the file or Cancel, please click on Save and Tomcat Server download will begin.
The next step is to "uncompress/unzip" the .zip format file of Tomcat Server in C: drive of your system and this installs the
Tomcat Server and its directory structure looks like the figure below.
Looking at the directory structure of Apache Tomcat Web Server, the webapps folder is where all the web applications that we are going to create will be
stored so they are accessible by the web browser.
In the next article, we will learn how to setup the environment variables for Tomcat web server
and then will also execute our first Servlet program using the Tomcat web server. So, read on.
