JSP files in external directory

Question

In my project, we allow customer to write customer specific logic in JSP pages and attach to our product. Right now after deploying .ear file customer copy the custom files under /WebContent/custom directory so that we can refer those JSPs. This is a tedious process for installation, I would like to simplify this.

I tried the following solution

1) extendedDocumentRoot - IBM WebSphere It works fine when I kept the JSP outside the EAR deployment directory

2) OC4J - This solution also works fine in OracleAS.

<virtual-directory virtual-path="/img" real-path="/e:/pictures/" />

I am looking for a generic solution for all J2EE containers.

Answer 1

No. There is no standard way to accomplish this. This is part of server deployment/configuration and it's out of scope for Servlet spec.

If you use Tomcat, you have to use yet another mechanism,

  <Context aliases="/img=/e:/pictures/" ...>

Answer 2

Very similar question here - Loading JSP pages from custom sources

I don't think this is possible with jsp because of the potential security risks. However, other view technologies, such as Velocity do support this.