Notes on the Spring framework

Serving static files: add appropriate servlet mappings for the default tomcat servlet to the file web.xml corresponding to the myapp web application.
E.g.
```
<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>*.css</url-pattern>
  <url-pattern>*.js</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
```
will cause tomcat to serve .css and .js files from the myapp top directory. Thus
```
wget http://tomcathost:8080/myapp/js/test.js
```
will serve the file /usr/local/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/myapp/js/test.js (i.e. ${CATALINA_BASE}/myapp/js/test.js).

For internationalisation, ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource seems more convenient than ResourceBundleMessageSource since the latter can be refreshed without halting the jvm (e.g. tomcat). Also, it allows for locations of bundles outside the classpath, as in

  <!-- in app-server.xml -->
  <bean id="messageSource"
    class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
    <property name="defaultEncoding" value="UTF-8"/>
    <property name="cacheSeconds" value="5"/>
    <property name="basenames">
      <list>
        <value>/WEB-INF/i8n/messages</value>
      </list>
    </property>
  </bean>

Note that the '.properties' suffix should never be part of <value>. To make the messages depend on the locale as communicated by the browser (e.g. in firefox: edit/preferences/content/languages-choose) add the following to app-server.xml

  <bean id="localeResolver" 
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.AcceptHeaderLocaleResolver"/>

In .jsp pages, use

  <%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" %>
  ..
  <fmt:message key="greeting"/>

If the locale is nl and

/WEB-INF/i8n/messages_nl.properties

exists, it may contain

greeting=Gegroet

causing <fmt:message key="greeting"/> to be shown as Gegroet.

It seems that you cannot configure log4j logging in a spring web application that is deployed with an unexpanded .war file. See the javadoc documentation on org.springframework.web.util.Log4jWebConfigurer. If you do 'expanded' deploy, then configuration can be done as follows.

In web.xml:

  <context-param>
    <param-name>log4jConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/config/log4j.properties</param-value>
  </context-param>
  <listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.util.Log4jConfigListener</listener-class>
  </listener>

In /WEB-INF/config/log4j.properties:

log4j.rootLogger=INFO, stdout, logfile

log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %p [%c] - <%m>%n

log4j.appender.logfile=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.logfile.File=/home/dvermeir/spring/demo2springapp/logs/springapp.log
log4j.appender.logfile.MaxFileSize=512KB
# Keep three backup files.
log4j.appender.logfile.MaxBackupIndex=3
# Pattern to output: date priority [category] - message
log4j.appender.logfile.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.logfile.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %p [%c] - %m%n

Dirk Vermeir (dvermeir@vub.ac.be) [Last modified: Thu Apr 2 18:47:33 CEST 2009 ]