Any clever ways of handling the context in a web app?

Question

In Java, web apps are bundled in to WARs. By default, many servlet containers will use the WAR name as the context name for the application.

Thus myapp.war gets depl

Answer 1

Except for special cases, I'd recommend against using absolute URLs this way. Ever. Absolute URLs are good for when another webapp is pointing at something in your webapp. Internally -- when one resource is pointing at a second resource in the same context -- the resource should know where it lives, so it should be able to express a relative path to the second resource.

Of course, you'll write modular components, which don't know the resource that's including them. For example:

/myapp/user/email.jsp:
Email: ${user.email}

/myapp/browse/profile.jsp:


/myapp/home.jsp:

So, how does email.jsp know the relative path of sendmail.jsp? Clearly the link will break on either /myapp/browse/profile.jsp or it will break on /myapp/home.jsp . The answer is, keep all your URLs in the same flat filepath space. That is, every URL should have no slashes after /myapp/ .

This is pretty easy to accomplish, as long as you have some kind of mapping between URLs and the actual files that generate the content. (e.g. in Spring, use DispatcherServlet to map URLs to JSP files or to views.)

There are special cases. e.g. if you're writing a browser-side application in Javascript, then it gets harder to maintain a flat filepath space. In that case, or in other special cases, or just if you have a personal preference, it's not really a big deal to use <%= request.getContextPath() %> to create an absolute path.