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

I by no means claim that the following is an elegant issue. In fact, in hindsight, I wouldn't recommend this issue given the (most likely) performance hit.

Our web app's JSPs were strictly XML raw data. This raw data was then sent into an XSL (server-side) which applied the right CSS tags, and spit out the XHTML.

We had a single template.xsl which would be inherited by the multiple XSL files that we had for different components of the website. Our paths were all defined in an XSL file called paths.xml:

    Account/
    css/
    servlet/
    icons/
    images/
    js/

An internal link would be in the XML as follows:

link to icons

This would get processed by our XSL:

$rootPath was passed onto each file with ${applicationScope.contextPath} The idea behind us using XML instead of just hard-coding it in a JSP/Java file was we didn't want to have to recompile.

Again, the solution isn't a good one at all...but we did use it once!

Edit: Actually, the complexity in our issue arose because we weren't able to use JSPs for our entire view. Why wouldn't someone just use ${applicationScope.contextPath} to retrieve the context path? It worked fine for us then.