| Essential Software |

The first and most basic thing you need to decide is whether you're going to be doing JSP development on Windows or Linux (this tutorial covers both). Myself, I have it working on both my Windows 95 system and my Linux box. If you have the machines to spare, or simply have lots of time on your hands (loser!), you can do the same; if not, pick one and then get yourself copies of all the programs listed below.

Java Development Kit: The J in JSP stands for Java, and you can't do anything without a copy of the latest Java Development Kit from Sun Microsystems. As of this writing, the latest kit is available from http://java.sun.com/ for both Windows and Linux platforms. This tutorial uses the Java2 SDK 1.3.

Tomcat: Sun's recommended server for JSP development, Tomcat takes care of parsing JSP pages and also provides a servlet engine for Java servlets. You can download a copy of Tomcat from The Jakarta Project's Web site at http://jakarta.apache.org/ . This tutorial uses Tomcat 3.2.

Apache: The world's favourite Web server, Apache handles all requests for static HTML content and non-JSP pages. Get yourself a copy for your platform from http://www.apache.org/ . This tutorial uses Apache 1.3.14. 

JServ: JServ is an Apache loadable module that serves as the all-important connection between the Tomcat and Apache servers. You can download a copy from http://java.apache.org/jserv/ . This tutorial uses JServ 1.1.1.

Once you've got all that down, it's time to get down to business. We'll do a Windows installation first.

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