Static Resources problem

Question

Hi,
I am currently programming a web application and have stored my images in <webapprootdir>/images/image.jpg. However when i attempt to access the image through a jsp in the application's context i.e. www.mywebsite.com/mayapplicationcontext/jspwithimage.jsp, the image is not found.
Is there any way to elegantly load the image without using hard wiring??
thank you
Arnold Oree

Answer 1

What's the url for the image?
Things can get tricky when you're using a relative path and switching between servlet and jsp contexts, since the servlet has a component in its url (typically 'servlet') that does not exist in the filesystem. For this reason I usually use an absolute path from the webserver root when referencing images.
For example, the 'key' image on the page has this url:
http://uk.parallaxict.com/images/gui/clientlogin.gif
which I would reference in a tag as:
<img src="/images/gui/clientlogin.gif">
Which will work on any page served from the site "http://uk.parallaxict.com/"
Remember that each image in the page is a separate http request from the browser. Although relative paths are allowed, the browser must extrapolate them into a full url before making the request. If there is a leading '/', then it prepends only the site name. If there is no leading '/', then it prepends everything before the last '/' of the full url of the requested page.