Using .html files as JSPs

Question

This may be a silly question but I've found no answer when googling this.

Currently, I map the requests from someFileName.html to a servlet which then forwards to someFileName.jsp using servlet mappings in web.xml. I would like to avoid that and just configure my application server so that html files are parsed and executed as if they were JSPs (so that custom tags and EL could be used from within the HTML). Bonus to answers that allow any extensions to be mapped to the JSP processor.

I use Tomcat but I'd like the solution to be portable to other containers such as Glassfish.

Solution

With 2 simple steps you can achieve this:

1. Add this servletmapping for the JSP servlet:

   <servlet-mapping>
       <servlet-name>jsp</servlet-name>
       <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>
   

   This tells the application container to use the the JSP servlet when serving html files.

2. Comment out the <mime-mapping> for text/html mime type (*.html) files so that the container won't handle HTML files as static content.

Hope this helps.

Comments

[jd.]

About part 2), I may not have access to Tomcat's default web.xml to remove that. Is it possible to overwrite this value un the application's local web.xml ?

[fasseg]

yep you can add it to your web app's web.xml. you can check the servlet spec for the web application deployment descriptor jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/first/jsr053/index.html

[dutoitns]

Step (2) wasn't needed for me. I'm using Apache Tomcat 8.5.4