Filter to redirect to welcome action when pre-compiling JSPs

[Jason Lea]

I have been playing around with JSP pre-compilation with Tomcat-4.1.24 
(http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/jasper-howto.html) so I 
can check my JSP pages for compiler errors before deployment, but also 
to remove the delay that the first hit incurs.

The only problem with this is the <welcome-file> which has to point to a 
physical jsp page and not a servlet.  The Struts in Action book suggests 
 using a index.jsp page with a <logic:redirect> to a Welcome action, 
which is what I was doing.

I tried creating a servlet that would forward the request onto my 
Welcome action & servlet-mapping with a <url-pattern>/<url-pattern>, but 
this seemed to match any request and cause lots of problems.

So I dropped that idea and instead have used a filter...

<filter-mapping>
  <filter-name>WelcomeFilter</filter-name>
  <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
which works perfectly.  It only fires for http://localhost/app/ or 
http://localhost/app and my filter forwards the request onto my Welcome 
action correctly.

I can now get rid of index.jsp and all my other JSPs are pre-compiled. 
I have also hidden all of my JSPs under the WEB-INF so they cannot be 
called directly and have to go through my Struts actions.

Jason Lea

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