Web application resources
The resources associated with a web application are located within its document base and are comprised of static files (for example, HTML and CSS files), JAR files, property files, as well as class files.
Resources are organized using the standard WAR file format. In this organization, static content can be found directly within the document base, or in subfolders within the document base. Any JAR files for this web application are located under the WEB-INF/lib folder, and any class files, configuration files, and property files are found in packages within the WEB-INF/classes folder.
As an application's resources can exist either as compressed files within a WAR file, or as exploded files in a directory, a key design goal was to provide a storage agnostic way of accessing the resources associated with a web application.
Implementing a storage-independent mechanism for resource access makes it possible to support additional storage mechanisms, such as having resources...
