Question

I’m using Google AppEngine with Java. I would like to be able to redirect users that go to something like:

mydomain.com/<their screen name>

to a servlet that can show their profile.

I’m not sure that there is an url-pattern I could use in my web.xml file that would map correctly without interfering with the stuff I do want mapped to other places (like .jsp files, etc.)

I could do this with a custom 404 redirect, but that doesn’t seem like the best option.

Is there a better way to map a mydomain.com/screenName type pattern to a custom servlet?

Answer 1

Wouldn’t it be better to map the user screen names to a sub-path, for example:

mydomain.com/user/<their screen name>

Then in your web.xml:

<servlet-mapping>
 <servlet-name>UserServlet</servlet-name>
 <url-pattern>/user/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

UserServlet in this example could take care of doing whatever it is you need to with each user’s screen name. This also helps because it won’t interfere with your current mappings.