why aliase in servlet or jsp

[Arun Maalik]

Dear sir i would like to know one thing that when we deploye a servlet with sun microsystem deployee tool then we give two name

first one is the context root
second is the Aliase

But why we give the aliase name of servlet? is it mandatory?

with regard

Arun kumar maalik

[nelson christos]

yeah the alias is mandatory
the alias specified in the web.xml file in WEB-INF dir is used by the container to recoginize the web resource and then initialize it.
and anyway you never specify the direct location of your web resource.