You can put your JSP's in the WEB-INF, in fact I do it all the time, because I want to hide the raw JSP from the outside world. Anything inside WEB-INF will be hidden and any user going to your server will not be able to reach the files in there directly. If you just want your sample JSP to run, place it in the correct path as described by vinotht, but if you still want it to remain inside the WEB-INF folder you will need to create a separate servlet, map that to some url or all urls and then use a request dispatcher to forward the user to the JSP inside the WEB-INF folder.