The quickest way to setup SiteMesh is to import sitemesh-blank.war into your development environment or server.
Having said that, manually setting up SiteMesh is also a very straightforward process. These steps are also useful for setting up SiteMesh on an existing Web Application.
Completely Newbie
If you are a complete newbie to Java Web Application Development you should here is list of topics that you might want to Google before starting,
- What is an Java Application Server
- How to Setup the Eclipse with Tomcat
- How to Setup a Default Web Application
Install SiteMesh Manually
Manually installing SiteMesh into your web application consists of three steps,
- Add the SiteMesh library file to WEB-INF/lib
- Add the SiteMesh filter to web.xml
- Create a blank decorators.xml file
Setup Library File
Copy the SiteMesh jar file into your web application's WEB-INF/lib directory. In this example we downloaded SiteMesh 2.4.1 which uses the jar name, sitemesh-2.4.1.jar.
Add SiteMesh Filter
Add the following to WEB-INF/web.xml within the <web-app> tag,
Create the a decorators.xml file in your WEB-INF directory,
If you start up your application server (container) and get no errors then SiteMesh is is ready to go. However, SiteMesh will not do anything yet. Continue to Start Using SiteMesh in 10 minutes.