Noughts

I was playing around with the Google Maps API, when I found that I can’t access my Javascript files in Glassfish. The JSPs were working fine, so I guess it’s some URL handling thing in web.xml. As it turns out, there’s a default servlet in Glassfish that should be used to serve static resources (like CSS, Javascript, PDF, image files, etc). Digging into ${GLASSFISH_HOME}/glassfish/domains/domain1/config, I found the default-web.xml. Under the section called “Built In Servlet Definitions”, there’s this XML snippet:

<servlet>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.apache.catalina.servlets.DefaultServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>debug</param-name>
<param-value>0</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>listings</param-name>
<param-value>false</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

I copied this verbatim into my web.xml.

Now, I want the default servlet to handle all the accesses to the static resources. I tried to map URLs with certain prefixes to this servlet like so:

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/js/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/css/*</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>/img/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Not sure what the problem is, but it doesn’t work. I’m forced to try extension matching instead:

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.gif</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.png</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.js</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.css</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.txt</url-pattern>
<url-pattern>*.pdf</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Well, now that works, but it’s not an elegant solution. Imagine, if I want to serve a new kind of file, say an Excel file, I have to remember to include the extension in web.xml, besides just throwing the file into the correct folder. I will have to relook into this again, but for now, I’m just happy it works

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 11:59 am and is filed under Java, J2EE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.