This post shows you some tips you’ll likely need to use JSP with Jersey in typical Java webapps.

Tested Conditions

While Jersey 1.1.1-ea or later is probably the only hard requirement for the tips to work, my development environment is listed here for your info. You are welcome to add to this rather meager basis for sanity.

1. Jersey 1.1.1-ea
2. Tomcat 6.0.20
3. JDK 1.5
4. OS X Leopard

Change JSP Base Template Path

Default base path for templates is the root of the webapp. So if my webapp is at “/…/webapps/myapp” then Viewable(“/mypage”, null) will map to “/…/webapps/myapp/mypage.jsp”

To change this, say to “WEB-INF/jsp” as it’s commonly done for security reasons, add following init-param to Jersey servlet/filter in web.xml:

<init-param>
<param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.JSPTemplatesBasePath</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/jsp</param-value>
</init-param>

Return Viewable as part of Response

It was not obvious to me (doh) where Viewable fits into Response when I have to return a Response instead of Viewable. It turns out, Viewable can be passed where message body entity is passed. Example:

return Response.ok(new Viewable("/mypage", model).build();

Use “/*” as servlet-mapping for Jersey

The primitive servlet-mapping URI pattern scheme, which somehow survived many iterations of the servlet API, impacts JAX-RS hard if servlet-mapping is overly broad. Unfortunately, pretty restful URL calls for servlet-mapping to be “/*” instead of something like “/jersey/*”, breaking access to JSP files as well as static resources.

To work around, you’ll have to use Jersey as a filter instead of a servlet and edit a regular-expression init-param value to punch passthrough holes in Jersey’s routing scheme. To enable this, replace Jersey servlet entry in web.xml with something like this:

<filter>
 <filter-name>jersey</filter-name>
 <filter-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</filter-class>
 <init-param>
  <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.WebPageContentRegex</param-name>
  <param-value>/(images|js|styles|(WEB-INF/jsp))/.*</param-value>
 </init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
 <filter-name>jersey</filter-name>
 <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

That’s all for now. Hope this post saved you some headaches.