Before you can write effective OFBiz Java code, you need to understand some basics about the environment in which OFBiz operates. In the previous chapter, we learned that OFBiz executes within a JVM. That JVM, in turn, hosts a Java servlet container. The servlet container provides all the basic programming infrastructure necessary to build and run OFBiz web applications (sometimes referred to as "webapps").
Note
Out-of-the-box, bundled with the distribution, OFBiz embeds the Tomcat servlet container, http://apache.tomcat.org. It is possible to implement other servlet containers as well as run OFBiz within a Java application server such as JBoss, WebSphere®, or WebLogic®.
In this book, we first describe what it takes to develop OFBiz webapps. Traditionally, writing Java web applications has meant writing entire servlets. When writing OFBiz webapps, you typically do not write an entire servlet. Instead, you create one or more Java methods that are invoked by the OFBiz controller...