How to access static resources when mapping a global front controller servlet on /*

Question

I\'ve mapped the Spring MVC dispatcher as a global front controller servlet on /*.

Answer 1

In section "12.2 Specification of Mappings" of the Servlet Specification, it says:

A string containing only the ’/’ character indicates the "default" servlet of the application.

So in theory, you could make your Servlet mapped to /* do:

getServletContext().getNamedDispatcher("/").forward(req,res);

... if you didn't want to handle it yourself.

However, in practice, it doesn't work.

In both Tomcat and Jetty, the call to getServletContext().getNamedDispatcher('/') returns null if there is a servlet mapped to '/*'