We maintain a very large application, with somewhere around 2,000 JSP files (in addition to ~250,000 lines of pure Java). We have decided it is about time we ship our application with precompiled JSP files.
The Ant tasks from Tomcat to support this effort have been extremely helpful, and I have no serious complaints about them. We can even use our own package name for the JSPs. Great! Our first challenge is that we support Tomcat, GlassFish, WebLogic and WebSphere, so our JSPs have to be precompiled in such a way that they will run in any of those web containers. We’ll overcome that challenge I’m sure; if we have to include some extra libraries, we’ll make it work. Our second challenge is the 11,500-line web.xml file that results from this process. I understand that Ant does a lot of the hard work for me, but a web.xml file this large bothers me, even if I don’t have to look at it during every day development. What’s more, we’re actually trying to *move away* from having a web.xml file (of any real substance) and using new Servlet 3.0 features. I could swear I saw an example a while ago (while searching Google, of course) of a web.xml file with a single servlet that responded to requests for ALL JSPs that had be precompiled, but I can’t find it anywhere anymore. I’m sure I *could* write my own servlet to accomplish this, but I’d sure like to use something existing that already has common usage. Does anyone have any ideas?
