Question

I have created a JSF 2.0 application as shown in the Eclipse Documentation with the Eclipse Indigo and Tomcat 7.0.32.

In this application I have two pages:

1. login.xhtml
2. welcome.xhtml

From login.xhtml I am navigation to welcome.xhtml.

And I have declared the login.xhtml as the welcome page in my web.xml.

  <welcome-file-list>
    <welcome-file>login.xhtml</welcome-file>
  </welcome-file-list>

And also defined the url-pattern for Faces Servlet as:

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.xhtml</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

Now I am having two issues:

1. When I am accessing the URL http://localhost:8080/LibraryInformationSystem/ I can see the login page, but after login, when I am being navigated to the welcome.xhtml, the URL is changing to http://localhost:8080/LibraryInformationSystem/login.xhtml not http://localhost:8080/LibraryInformationSystem/welcome.xhtml; but if I manually browse http://localhost:8080/LibraryInformationSystem/welcome.xhtml, it is also showing same thing. My question is why the URL is not changing? Is it the right way to define the default page? I have found information from two other SO threads, first one is here and the second one is here.
2. The second problem is, when I am running the application from Eclipse and when it launches the application to its internal browser, I can see the login page, but if I shutdown the server running from Eclipse and run the Tomcat from the batch file startup.bat which resides in bin folder and export the application as a war file and deploy it into the webapps folder, sometime I can see the login page, sometime I am having the Tomcat’s HTTP Error – 404 page, from Firefox or Chrome. If I close the startup.bat and delete the myapplication.war and myapplication folder from the webapps folder, then again start the server from startup.bat and again export the war from Eclipse I can see the login page, in this case no 404 error. Why it is happening?

Any pointer would be very helpful to me.

Answer 1

About point 1), JSF breaks the HTTP semantics. It should be using a GET to provide the contents of http://localhost:8080/LibraryInformationSystem/welcome.xhtml, but JSF uses POST so the URL does not change. You can do a Post-Redirect-Get to update the URL, but it is not how JSF works by default.

About point 2, you should avoid making two questions in the same SO question.