title: Servlet for serving static content
body: <p>I deploy a webapp on two different containers (Tomcat and Jetty), but their default servlets for serving the static content have a different way of handling the URL structure I want to use (<a href="http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42411" rel="noreferrer">details</a>).</p>
  
  <p>I am therefore looking to include a small servlet in the webapp to serve its own static content (images, CSS, etc.). The servlet should have the following properties:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>No external dependencies</li>
  <li>Simple and reliable</li>
  <li>Support for <a href="http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1945/58.htm" rel="noreferrer"><code>If-Modified-Since</code></a> header (i.e. custom <a href="http://java.sun.com/j2ee/1.4/docs/api/javax/servlet/http/HttpServlet.html#getLastModified(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest)" rel="noreferrer"><code>getLastModified</code></a> method)</li>
  <li>(Optional) support for gzip encoding, etags,...</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Is such a servlet available somewhere? The closest I can find is <a href="http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/java-ent/servlet/ch04_04.htm#ch04-35758" rel="noreferrer">example 4-10</a> from the servlet book.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong> The URL structure I want to use - in case you are wondering - is simply:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>    &lt;servlet-mapping&gt;
              &lt;servlet-name&gt;main&lt;/servlet-name&gt;
              &lt;url-pattern&gt;/*&lt;/url-pattern&gt;
      &lt;/servlet-mapping&gt;
      &lt;servlet-mapping&gt;
              &lt;servlet-name&gt;default&lt;/servlet-name&gt;
              &lt;url-pattern&gt;/static/*&lt;/url-pattern&gt;
      &lt;/servlet-mapping&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So all requests should be passed to the main servlet, unless they are for the <code>static</code> path. The problem is that Tomcat's default servlet does not take the ServletPath into account (so it looks for the static files in the main folder), while Jetty does (so it looks in the <code>static</code> folder).</p>