Chapter 5. Controlling Web Application Behavior with web.xml

Topics in This Chapter

• Customizing URLs

• Turning off default URLs

• Initializing servlets and JSP pages

• Preloading servlets and JSP pages

• Declaring filters for servlets and JSP pages

• Designating welcome pages and error pages

• Restricting access to Web resources

• Controlling session timeouts

• Documenting Web applications

• Specifying MIME types

• Locating tag library descriptors

• Declaring event listeners

• Accessing J2EE resources

This chapter describes the makeup of the deployment descriptor file that is placed in WEB- INF/web.xml within each Web application. I’ll summarize all the legal elements here; for the formal specification see http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd (for version 2.3 of the servlet API) or http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/web-app_2_2.dtd (for version 2.2).

Most of the servlet and JSP examples in this chapter assume that they are part of a Web application named deployDemo. For details on how to set up and register Web applications, please see Chapter 4 (Using and Deploying Web Applications).