Question

What is the difference between relative and absolute url in servlet container. for example if there is an jsp called forum.jsp under webinf folder. when i want dispatch the current request to the jsp from the current jsp file which is under the same webinf folder, is the following correct way

/forum.jsp

relative url means relative to the web-inf folder or to the jsp location.

Answer 1

Absolute URL is : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3591899/relative-url-and-absolute-url-difference

and a relative URL is: /questions/3591899/relative-url-and-absolute-url-difference

Also, a relative URL can be just: ../questions/3591899/relative-url-and-absolute-url-difference depending where is the linking page located…

Or ./3591899/relative-url-and-absolute-url-difference if the linking page is located on the questions folder

I will suggest to always use Relative URL… and it goes hard, keep trying to use them…

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One question, why your JSPs are in the WEB-INF/ folder?

You don’t have access to JSP under the WEB-INF folder, if you try to access it the server will throw a 404 error. J2EE only looks for classes and libraries under this folder.