Bug 27704

Created attachment 10803 [details]
Test case for the described behavior.

Well, again, this is normal: the JSP servlet is mapped to the
jsp-property-group. Again, very little chance of being fixed for now ;)

Ok, this may be perfectly normal from a code perspective, but it is unexpected
behavior that has by now caused me to replace my Servlet2.4/JSP2.0 application
for a Servlet2.3/JSP1.2 application.

Of course everything will also work using the older specs but I'm looking
forward to these issues being fixed in a (hopefully not to remote) future version.

And thanks for not closing my bug this time so I'd have to reopen it again ;)

I completely disagree with your two bug reports. Either they are invalid or the
specification is broken. The main problem is this sentence: "If at least one
<jsp-propertygroup> contains the most specific matching URL pattern, the
resource is considered to be a JSP file". This is clearly extremely bad behavior
when using wildcard patterns.
I am going to veto any attempt to fix these last two "bugs" (with bug 27664)
until I am explained why the specification is not broken.

I do not understand the badness of this behavior. If a resource is matched by a
jsp-property-group, it should be considered a JSP file. If a resource has the
extension .jsp it should be considered a JSP file. What's the difference between
these two?

If you include directories with the resources that match a url-pattern, this
explains bug 27664: a directory is then served as a JSP file, which can not be
found, resulting in a 404.

However, JSP3.3 states: "A JSP property group is a collection of properties that
apply to a set of files that represent JSP pages." Directories are apparently
not included in this definition.

SRV9.10 states: "The purpose of this mechanism is to allow the deployer to
specify an ordered list of partial URIs for the container to use for appending
to URIs when there is a request for a URI that corresponds to a directory entry
in the WAR not mapped to a Web component." Requests for a directory should
result in an attempt to append welcome files to this directory.

The problem is that this jsp-property-group feature is that it conflicts with
servlet mapping rules, and forces the JSP implementation to be a mini servlet
container in itslef.

Ok, I agree with the fact that this will probably make a mini servlet container
of the JSP implementation and that this is undesired. But not fixing this also
means that Tomcat is not fully compliant with the spec. This may become a
problem when products that Tomcat is integrated into attempt to become J2EE 1.4
compatible.

You'll probably be happy to know this is the last thing I will say about this issue.

As I said, I contend that this was not what was intended by the spec authors.
Due to the "servlet mapping"-like effect of jsp-property-group, and yet the need
to have web server like features and a JSP container (I'm sure in 5 minutes
you'll be complaining that directory listings do not work), you need special JSP
specific processing in your servlet container (and this processing is relatively
complex).
To implement jsp-property-group properly, you probably would have to do some
mapping hacks, and assign some requests to the JSP servlet (after regular
mapping), which is relatively complex (jsp-property-group/url-mapping is not
trivial, and you have to do it during request dispatching as well), has a
performance cost (similar to filter mapping), and introduces obvious
dependencies with JSP.
That violates the original design idea of the independence of the servlet and
JSP specs.

Reopening so that I can close it as FIXED.