On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Jan Grant wrote: > Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 13:59:10 +0100 (BST) > From: Jan Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To: tomcat-dev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: welcome files being forwarded to rather than redirected to? > > A while ago I sent a message about the behaviour of welcome files going > against the recommendations at http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI; at > the time the servlet spec was in PFD and was fairly explicit that > sending a redirect wasn't acceptable. > > Looking at the final spec, it appears that they've toned down their > language a little - nevertheless, this kind of behaviour (avoiding > redirects) seems preferable. > > Unfortunately, the latest stable tomcat/catalina (congrats on this, by > the way!) still behaves in the old way. > > I know I can explicitly map any URIs to particular JSPs or html files; > however, I'd like to avoid having to do that (the convenience of welcome > files is completely lost). > > Is this set in stone? >
It's not at all clear that the "Persistent URI" article you referenced has anything to do with whether a redirect is used for a welcome file or not (the original persistent URI that the *human* used is still the same, no matter what technology is used on the server end) ... but there is a practical reason for the current behavior as well. Originally (back in the pre-3.2-final days), Tomcat did the equivalent of a RequestDispatcher.forward() to display welcome pages. This caused massive problems for people who didn't understand the difference between: http://foo.bar/webapp and http://foo.bar/webapp/ In the former case, any relative urls on the "real" welcome page are broken. This caused bug reports about welcome files not working (never mind that using a <base> element in your welcome page would have fixed it), which led to the current behavior. > Cheers, > jan > Craig > PS. original message here: > http://w4.metronet.com/~wjm/tomcat/2001/Apr/msg00234.html > - in a nutshell: if I request http://foo.bar/webapp/ > I'd like to see the contents of .../webapp/index.html, but _not_ see a > redirect to http://foo.bar/webapp/index.html > > > -- > jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ > Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ( echo "ouroboros"; cat ) > /dev/fd/0 # it's like talking to yourself sometimes > >
