What does WEB-INF stand for in a Java EE web application?

servlets jakarta-ee web-applications web-inf
euphoria83 picture euphoria83 · Mar 28, 2009 · Viewed 32.9k times · Source

Most of the places on the internet say it stands for WEB INFormation.

I rather doubt it. The folder contains executables. Information is not a suitable name for it.

Answer

Andy White picture Andy White · Mar 28, 2009

As far as I know, "INF" stands for "Information", as you said. It probably was named WEB-INF for similarity with the META-INF directory in JAR files. Sometimes the meaning of a directory changes so much over time that it no longer makes sense. For example, bin directories in Unix/Linux often contain non-binary "executable" files, such as shell scripts.

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