Re: Dealing with application names in a JEE web app

From:
Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Tue, 24 May 2011 18:16:27 +0100
Message-ID:
<alpine.DEB.2.00.1105241802310.27717@urchin.earth.li>
On Mon, 23 May 2011, markspace wrote:

So how do folks write their apps so that they can handle being deployed
under different names?


Just to add to what others have said, the ground truth value for the path
at which your app is located is HttpServletRequest.getContextPath:

http://download.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/servlet/http/HttpServletRequest.html#getContextPath%28%29

Having access to that lets you programmatically construct URLs of various
kinds (absolute, host-relative, etc). That's how various things, like
c:url, get this right.

It doesn't help you deal with this in resources which are not
programmatic, like static CSS, so here you have to depend on relative
references. This doesn't strike me as difficult - you decide early on to
keep all your css under /contextpath/css, and your site furniture images
under /contextpath/images, and then because CSS image paths are relative
to the stylesheet, in your CSS you can write:

background:url(../images/bbg.jpg) left top repeat;

A similar approach should be usable in other static resources which
contain links.

tom

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