Aspects of the Context component
The components that we have encountered up until now, such as the server, service, engine, and host, have tended to be far more interesting to administrators than to developers. It is with the context, however, that this balance begins to shift.
To serve this duality of purpose, a context actually exposes two forms of itself. To an administrator, it shows itself in its 'Context' aspect, whereas to a developer, it shows itself in its 'Web application' aspect.
Each aspect comes with its own set of configuration files; the context aspect of this component is configured using a context fragment, whereas a deployment descriptor is used to configure its web application aspect.
If that weren't exciting enough, each aspect can be configured at three separate levels at the server level, at the host level, and at the individual context level. This inheritance hierarchy helps you in organizing your configuration parameters. You can move general configuration to a higher...
