I'm trying to see if there is a framework or open source project out that that will allow me to bundle seperate JARs of html, images, js and class files and drop them outside of a the WAR file to be picked up at runtime by the Web Application.

For example, my core application would be in a WAR file [CoreApp.war] but on an external directory on the filesystem I want to deploy packages of self-contained individual group of JSP, HTML, images, Java-Script files that will get picked up at runtime. So that the core app can act as the driver but the individual JSP's in each app along with some XML mapping can support the components on it's own.

Any thoughts on open-source products that do that or if there is anything that comes close that I can expand...

Thank you all...

Venkatt Guhesan

hi,
Because of security problems, each web Applicatin has access to its own context and can not access to other parts of file system.

Maybe I'm missing a point but most of app servers allow you to get another context or redirect/dispatch requests to another web apps...

yes, we can redirect the request to another context, but we dont have access to manage or load/unload recources from other
context.

WebLogic supports this in the EAR or WAR file, if you setup a virtual directory, you can then read JSP JARs, htmls, gif/jpgs from a different directory on the system. This way, all the WAR files that you have can share the same static/dynamic resources.

<virtual-directory-mapping>

     <local-path>c:/usr/gifs</local-path>

     <url-pattern>/images/*</url-pattern>

     <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>

</virtual-directory-mapping>

<virtual-directory-mapping>

     <local-path>c:/usr/common_jsps.jar</local-path>

     <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>

</virtual-directory-mapping>