Static Resources Bld

RIFE2's main intent is to generate content and responses to interactions for dynamic web application resources.

Most web applications are however a combination of dynamic resources and static resources like images, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, fonts, videos, audio, ... Since RIFE2 runs inside regular Java servlet containers like Jetty or Tomcat, you can leverage the static file handling that is already implemented.

Leverage the servlet container

The project structure that RIFE2's bld has created is already set up to provide your webapp resources alongside your code. It knows how to include these inside the war archive for deployment. You're free to organize any static file you need inside the webapp directory.

For instance:

└── src/
    ├── bld/
    ├── main/
    │   ├── java/
    │   ├── resources/
    │   └── webapp/
    │       ├── css/
    │       │   └── main.css
    │       ├── favicon.ico
    │       ├── images/
    │       │   ├── logo.png
    │       │   └── photo.jpg
    │       ├── js/
    │       │   └── main.js
    │       ├── robots.txt
    │       └── WEB-INF/
    │           └── web.xml
    └── test/
        ├── java/
        └── resources/

All that's now left to do, is to tell the RIFE2 embedded web server to use that same directory when you run your application that way:

public class AppSite extends Site {
    // ...
    
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Server()
            .staticResourceBase("src/main/webapp")
            .start(new AppSite());
    }
}

Configure the pass-through types

The reason why the approach above works, is that RIFE2 is set up as a filter and automatically passes through any request that matches a collection of suffixes.

This is the default list:

aac, arj, avi, bmp, class, css, flac, gif, gz, htc, htm, html, ico, jar, jpeg, jpg, js, m4a, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, ogg, otf, png, svg, swf, ttf, txt, wav, wma, z, zip

If you need to add more types or remove some, you can tweak this list yourself by using RifeConfig.engine().setPassThroughSuffixes()

Bundling resources into an UberJar

When you choose to deploy your application in an UberJar, you'll want to include all the static resources also. The bld project already does this as long as you put them in the standard webapp directory.

In order to have the server look those resource up from the UberJar, I recommend that you create a dedicated main class, called AppSiteUber. You can tell the bld about it by editing src/bld/java/hello/AppBuild.java as such:

public class AppBuild extends WebProject {
    public AppBuild() {
        // ...
        uberJarMainClass = "hello.AppSiteUber";
        // ...
    }
    // public static void main ...
}

The dedicated main class allows you to continue to run your application in development mode with bld and also have the embedded Jetty container find the static resources when they're included in a jar, you'll just have to tell RIFE2 that the static resource base is different.

The src/main/java/hello/AppSiteUber.java file extends your existing site and merely provides a main method that is configured for UberJar deployment:

package hello;

import rife.engine.Server;

public class AppSiteUber extends AppSite {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Server()
            .staticUberJarResourceBase("webapp")
            .start(new AppSiteUber());
    }
}

Since the UberJar is likely intended for production deployment, you can further configure the Jetty server in this class also, for instance by specifying a hostname, port number, configuring the thread pool or even set up SSL.

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