Servlet for serving static content

Asked 2008-09-25T08:04:28.353

153

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 structure I want to use (details).

I am therefore looking to include a small servlet in the webapp to serve its own static content (images, CSS, etc.). The servlet should have the following properties:

No external dependencies
Simple and reliable
Support for If-Modified-Since header (i.e. custom getLastModified method)
(Optional) support for gzip encoding, etags,...

Is such a servlet available somewhere? The closest I can find is example 4-10 from the servlet book.

Update: The URL structure I want to use - in case you are wondering - is simply:

    <servlet-mapping>
            <servlet-name>main</servlet-name>
            <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-mapping>
            <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
            <url-pattern>/static/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

So all requests should be passed to the main servlet, unless they are for the static path. The problem is that Tomcat's default servlet does not take the ServletPath into account (so it looks for the static files in the main folder), while Jetty does (so it looks in the static folder).

Edit Report

2 Answers

I came up with a slightly different solution. It's a bit hack-ish, but here is the mapping:

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

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>myAppServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

This basically just maps all content files by extension to the default servlet, and everything else to "myAppServlet".

It works in both Jetty and Tomcat.

answered 2010-08-27T07:36:52.483

I did this by extending the tomcat DefaultServlet (src) and overriding the getRelativePath() method.

package com.example;

import javax.servlet.ServletConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import org.apache.catalina.servlets.DefaultServlet;

public class StaticServlet extends DefaultServlet
{
   protected String pathPrefix = "/static";

   public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException
   {
      super.init(config);

      if (config.getInitParameter("pathPrefix") != null)
      {
         pathPrefix = config.getInitParameter("pathPrefix");
      }
   }

   protected String getRelativePath(HttpServletRequest req)
   {
      return pathPrefix + super.getRelativePath(req);
   }
}

... And here are my servlet mappings

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>StaticServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.example.StaticServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>pathPrefix</param-name>
        <param-value>/static</param-value>
    </init-param>       
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>StaticServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/static/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

answered 2009-09-23T18:19:10.053

Servlet for serving static content

2 Answers

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