Serve Up Static Content Even When Mapping /* to a FrontController Servlet.

I am blogging this to share the info as much as to remind myself in the future how simple setting this up really is. It's the easy solutions that can be the hardest to remember..

Say you have a RESTful services framework running in a web app and all of your requests get routed to CXF or some other Framework for supporting such implementations. Simply put, there isn't a UI for the app and the Controller Servlet does't support a UI. Now say that you really want to be able to serve up say.. a JS file and some css to style generated API documentation for your services. No problem since this is Tomcat except you have a /* url-pattern routing all traffic to a REST Servlet.

Here's the solution: Most Java servers have a default servlet of some sort which will simply handle HTTP requests. If you set up a url-pattern to /static or some other path you can direct that request to your static files. One note, you'll be requesting /static/js/jquery-min.js but, the fiel will reside at /js/jquery-min.js this is because the /static is really acting as a indicator to rout to the default servlet. It's almost like a query string in the path.. no it makes since, really.

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/static/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>