The Web development environment provides the tools you need to develop Web applications as defined in the Sun Microsystems Java™ Servlet 2.3 Specification and the Sun Microsystems JSP 1.2 Specification. Web applications can be simple (consisting of only static Web pages) or they can be more advanced and include JavaServer Pages (JSP) files and Java servlets.

Web projects hold all of the Web resources that are created and used when developing your Web application. The first step to creating or importing a Web application is to create either a static or a dynamic Web project. Static Web projects are meant to contain only simple Web site resources, such as HTML files. Dynamic Web projects are used to structure Web applications that will use more complicated, dynamic Web technologies, such as JavaServer Pages files, and possibly data access resources.

There are two types of Web projects: dynamic and static. Dynamic web projects can contain dynamic Java EE resources such as servlets, JSP files, filters, and associated metadata, in addition to static resources such as images and HTML files. Static web projects only contains static resources. When you create Web projects, you can include cascading style sheets and JSP tag libraries (for dynamic Web projects), so that you can begin development with a richer set of project resources.