After writing the HelloWorld servlet of my last post, I realized that it’s usefulness was limited because people new to servlet programming would not know what needed to be changed in order to use the project as a template. So, I’ve created an Ant build.xml file to do the work for you.

Simply unzip my http://affy.blogspot.com/java/HelloWorldTemplateServlet.zip file into a convenient directory. Then connect to it via a DOS prompt and type ant. You’ll be prompted for the Eclipse workspace directory (d:\java\workspace, for me) and the name of the project that you want to create. Try aaa just to see what happens. Follow the directions in the README.txt file in the newly-created directory and you should have the servlet runing in a short amount of time.