Question

We have the usual web.xml for our web application which includes some jsp and jsp tag files. I want to switch to using pre-compiled jsp’s. I have the pre-compilation happening in the build ok, and it generates the web.xml fragment and now I want to merge the fragment into the main web.xml.

Is there an include type directive for web.xml that will let me include the fragment.

Ideally I will leave things as is for DEV- as its useful to change jsp’s on the fly and see the changes immediately but then for UAT/PROD, the jsp’s will be pre-compiled and thus work faster.

Answer 1

I use the Tomcat jasper ANT tasks in my project, which precompile the JSPs into servlets and add the new servlet mappings to the original web.xml. In the DEV builds, just skip this step and deploy the JSPs without pre-compile and modification of the web.xml.

    <?xml version='1.0'?> <project name='jspc' basedir='.' default='all'>  <import file='${build.appserver.home}/bin/catalina-tasks.xml'/>   <target name='all' depends='jspc,compile'></target>   <target name='jspc'>   <jasper    validateXml='false'    uriroot='${build.war.dir}'    webXmlFragment='${build.war.dir}/WEB-INF/generated_web.xml'    addWebXmlMappings='true'    outputDir='${build.src.dir}' />  </target>   <target name='compile'>   <javac destdir='${build.dir}/classes'    srcdir='${build.src.dir}'    optimize='on'    debug='off'    failonerror='true'    source='1.5'    target='1.5'    excludes='**/*.smap'>    <classpath>     <fileset dir='${build.war.dir}/WEB-INF/classes'>      <include name='*.class' />     </fileset>     <fileset dir='${build.war.lib.dir}'>      <include name='*.jar' />     </fileset>     <fileset dir='${build.appserver.home}/lib'>      <include name='*.jar' />     </fileset>         <fileset dir='${build.appserver.home}/bin'>      <include name='*.jar'/>     </fileset>    </classpath>     <include name='**' />     <exclude name='tags/**'/>   </javac>  </target>   <target name='clean'>   <delete>    <fileset dir='${build.src.dir}'/>    <fileset dir='${build.dir}/classes/org/apache/jsp'/>   </delete>  </target> </project> 

If you already have the JSP compilation working and just want to merge the web.xml files, a simple XSLT could be written to add selected elements(such as the servlet mappings) from the newly generated web,xml into your original.