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

When creating a site from scratch, I side with @Will - aim for a consistent and predictable url structure so that you can stick with relative references.

But things can get really messy if you are updating a site that was originally built to work directly under the site root "/" (pretty common for simple JSP sites) to formal Java EE packaging (where context root will be some path under the root).

That can mean a lot of code changes.

If you want to avoid or postpone the code changes, but still ensure correct context root referencing, a technique I've tested is to use servlet filters. The filter can be dropped into an existing proejct without changing anything (except web.xml), and will remap any url references in the outbound HTML to the correct path, and also ensure redirects are correctly referenced.

An example site and usable code available here: EnforceContextRootFilter-1.0-src.zip NB: the actual mapping rules are implemented as regex in the servlet class and provide a pretty general catch-all - but you may need to modify for particular circumstances.

btw, I forked a slightly different question to address migrating existing code base from "/" to a non-root context-path