How to handle static content in Spring MVC?

Question

I am developing a webapp using Spring MVC 3 and have the DispatcherServlet catching all requests to '/' like so (web.xml):

  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>app</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>app</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

Now this works as advertised, however how can I handle static content? Previously, before using RESTful URLs, I would have caught all *.html for example and sent that to the DispatcherServlet, but now it's a different ball game.

I have a /static/ folder which includes /styles/, /js/, /images/ etc and I would like to exclude /static/* from the DispatcherServlet.

Now I could get static resources working when I did this:

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>app</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/app/</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

But I want it to have nice URLs (the point of me using Spring MVC 3) not the landing page being www.domain.com/app/

I also don't want a solution coupled to tomcat or any other servlet container, and because this is (relatively) low traffic I don't need a webserver (like apache httpd) infront.

Is there a clean solution to this?

Answer 1

My way of solving this problem is placing all your actions with a specific prefix like "web" or "service" and configure that all url's with that prefix will be intercepted by the DispatcherServlet.

Answer 2

I got the same problem and found Joris's answer very helpful. But additionally I need to add

<mvc:annotation-driven /> 

to the servlet config file. Without that resource mapping will not work and all handlers will stop working. Hope this will help someone.

Answer 3

This did the real job in my case

in web.xml:

...
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/images/*</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>/css/*</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>/javascripts/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>


<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>spring-mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

...

Answer 4

I used both ways that is urlrewrite and annotation based in spring mvc 3.0.x and found that annotation based approach is most suitable that is

<annotation-driven />

<resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/" />

In case of urlrewrite,have to define lots of rule and some time also get class not found exception for UrlRewriteFilter as already provided the dependency for it. I found that it's happening due to the presence of transitive dependency, so again one step will increased and have to exclude that dependency from pom.xml using

<exclusion></exclusion> tags.

So annotation based approach will be the good deal.

Answer 5

I solved it this way:

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.png</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.gif</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.js</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.css</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

This works on Tomcat and ofcourse Jboss. However in the end I decided to use the solution Spring provides (as mentioned by rozky) which is far more portable.

Answer 6

I just add three rules before spring default rule (/**) to tuckey's urlrewritefilter (urlrewrite.xml) to solve the problem

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.0//EN" "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.0.dtd">
    <urlrewrite default-match-type="wildcard">
     <rule>
      <from>/</from>
      <to>/app/welcome</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/scripts/**</from>
      <to>/scripts/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/styles/**</from>
      <to>/styles/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/images/**</from>
      <to>/images/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/**</from>
      <to>/app/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <outbound-rule>
      <from>/app/**</from>
      <to>/$1</to>
     </outbound-rule> 
    </urlrewrite>