>From a purely practical standpoint, that would be terribly complicated. Mod_webapp would have to read and fully understand the web.xml and all of the servlet mappings. This is made even more impossible by the addition of filters to the Servlet API. How can mod_webapp even begin to guess at the hidden logic contained within a filter? It is totally impossible. It's not clear to me that you could feasibly implement this kind of front end and incur less overhead that simply passing the request to the servlet engine. Even if you could, at the end of the day, it would still be non-compliant because the last sentence of the second paragraph of section 3.1 of the Servlet API 2.3 Spec says:
"all requests that begin with the /catalog request path, known as the context path, are routed to the web application associated with the servlet context." I quoted this exact spec to a client because they wanted to do what you propose, only their engine is not smart enough to parse the web.xml. they wanted me to rename all of my pages to end in ".jsp" so that it would get forwarded. To be compliant, the spec must be fulfilled. ALL requests for the context path must be forwarded to the application. To do otherwise is not compliant with the spec. A specification is like a map through a mine field. You must do precisely what it says, without expansion, or interpolation. If you do otherwise, you will at the least blow your foot off. In our case, by scrupulously following the spec, we have an application that has been tested on 6-8 servlet engines with only one small tweak to work around a bug in one of them. Deviation from the specification, even in the name of imagined efficiency is not acceptable. This is particularly true of Tomcat since it has the role of "Reference Implementation". George Sexton MH Software, Inc. Home of Connect Daily Web Calendar Software http://www.mhsoftware.com/connectdaily.htm Voice: 303 438 9585 -----Original Message----- From: Endre Stølsvik [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 2:06 AM To: Tomcat Developers List Subject: Re: [4.1.23] Deprecating mod_webapp On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, George Sexton wrote: | It's also horribly broken and not compliant with the servlet API. | Specifically, it doesn't forward all requests within the context to the | servlet engine, but attempts to let Apache fulfill static requests. Isn't that one of the good reasons for having Apache as frontend? Serving (largish) images and other static files (e.g. stylesheets, XML, dtds etc) could be much mor effectively done by Apache, instead of using IPC of some kind to an Java engine, which had to parse and serve the request.. I mean, there are _large_ overheads that could be avoided.. If the mod_webapp served static requests, but honored the web.xml file _completly_, then it would be great, right? -- Mvh, Endre Stølsvik M[+47 93054050] F[+47 51625182] Developer @ CoreTrek AS - http://www.coretrek.com/ CoreTrek corporate portal / EIP - http://www.corelets.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]