Re: JSP Web-Development [newbie]

The following contains a lot of opinions, as opposed to facts. Caveat
emptor.

pmz wrote:


I'd regard this as somewhat suspect even in PHP. It requires URLs like
"http://example.com/?__mainArgument=myPlugin" and that looks kinda ugly
to the user. I'd rather supply the user with something like
"http://example.com/myPlugin" and use mod-rewrite to redirect that if
needed, thus eliminating any need to code it at all.

You can't use mod-rewrite in Java, because War files aren't visible to
Apache. All the Java files are contained within one archive which isn't
something Apache can read. So Java provides it's own way to do this,
again with out writing code, like what mod_rewrite provides.

In the WEB-INF/web.xml file, you'd bind a pattern to a name, like this:

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>MainPlugIn</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/myPlugin</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

That replaces mod_rewrite, and maps the url pattern after your hostname
to the name MainPlugIn. Now you have to do one more thing to map the
name MainPlugIn to some code.

<servlet>
<servlet-name>MainPlugIn</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>myplugin/plugin.jsp</servlet-class>
</servlet>

You may have to play with the servlet-class a bit, I'm not 100% sure
that it works exactly like that.

This is a very powerful feature, and you should use it as much as
possible. In particular, it allows you to change any url so that it
calls any code in your app, and you don't have to search and modify your
code to do it. Just change a config file and it works.