Question

I’m maintaining a legacy Java servlet webapp ( nwp ). My goal is to learn Spring and gradually update the webapp to use Spring as much as possible.

The servlet webapp, nwp, now runs on WebLogic 9.2. It is packaged and deployed as nwp.war. Every HTTP Request gets submitted to a unique servlet, which process the request and prints out a web page/screen. Each servlet will read in various resource files from a remote location outside of nwp.war to use for headers, footers, etc.

Yes, it is primative, which is why I want to update it. It also made sense to have the “include files” in a remote location outside of the war as 3 applications use those files. However, as part of updating the nwp app I plan on consolidating the other two ( similarly primative ) apps into just the nwp. Eventually.

As a first step in converting this application to Spring I have rearranged the directory tree to have these subdirectories under the WEB-INF dir:

• images
• js
• css

The servlet generated HTML references images as
“

My problem is that right now the servlet generated HTML can not find images in the WEB-INF/images directory inside of the nwp.war.

Right now, the nwp.war file contains a file called weblogic.xml to map the URLs for images to where they sit on the server:

<wls:virtual-directory-mapping>
        <wls:local-path>/common/resources/images</wls:local-path>
        <wls:url-pattern>/images/*</wls:url-pattern>
        <wls:url-pattern>*.jpg</wls:url-pattern> 
        <wls:url-pattern>*.gif</wls:url-pattern> 
</wls:virtual-directory-mapping>

I’m new to WebLogic and WebLogic 9.2.

I’ve tried changing that mapping in a number of was so that the servlet generated HTML will look for the pictures in the WEB-INF/images directory inside of the war.

Is this (servlet generated html finding images ) even possible or am I going to have to use the current system of getting images until I can convert the servlets into JSPs?

Thanks

Steve

Answer 1

The HTML won’t be able to directly reference images inside the WEB-INF folder. This is for security. So you have 2 options:

1. Move the images so that they’re directly under / rather than /WEB-INF/
2. Create another servlet to serve those images

If you decide to use a servlet, you can use ServletContext getResourceAsStream to access images from the /WEB-INF/images directory. For example:

servletContext.getResourceAsStream("/WEB-INF/images/test.jpg");