Servlet for serving static content

Question

I deploy a webapp on two different containers (Tomcat and Jetty), but their default servlets for serving the static content have a different way of handling the URL structur

Answer 1

To serve all requests from a Spring app as well as /favicon.ico and the JSP files from /WEB-INF/jsp/* that Spring's AbstractUrlBasedView will request you can just remap the jsp servlet and default servlet:

  
    springapp
    org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
    1
  

  
    jsp
    /WEB-INF/jsp/*
  

  
    default
    /favicon.ico
  

  
    springapp
    /*
  

We can't rely on the *.jsp url-pattern on the standard mapping for the jsp servlet because the path pattern '/*' is matched before any extension mapping is checked. Mapping the jsp servlet to a deeper folder means it's matched first. Matching '/favicon.ico' exactly happens before path pattern matching. Deeper path matches will work, or exact matches, but no extension matches can make it past the '/*' path match. Mapping '/' to default servlet doesn't appear to work. You'd think the exact '/' would beat the '/*' path pattern on springapp.

The above filter solution doesn't work for forwarded/included JSP requests from the application. To make it work I had to apply the filter to springapp directly, at which point the url-pattern matching was useless as all requests that go to the application also go to its filters. So I added pattern matching to the filter and then learned about the 'jsp' servlet and saw that it doesn't remove the path prefix like the default servlet does. That solved my problem, which was not exactly the same but common enough.