I may be getting in over my head here as I'm really not all that familiar with patterns. And I'm not sure that the pattern has anything to do with problem. But I have a controller servlet through which all web requests must pass. It has worked fine as is. Until I tried to include a .js file on a jsp page. In that case it seems to either print it out to page, rather than execute it, or it tries to use requestDispatcher portion of controller servlet to forward/include it. Normally the requestDispatcher forwards request to the requested page after it checks to see if user is logged in. But now it seems to go into an infinite loop when forwarding. And I guess it's trying to use requestDispather.include because the .js resource is included via a "src='http:...' " request. I know that this is a very vague question but I wonder if anyone has any clues as to where the problem might lie or what I can start experimenting with.