GuiceFilter and Static Resources

GuiceContextListener and GuiceFilter can eliminate servlet mappings completely from the web.xml file. They also preserve the default servlet handling logic by re-routing a URL request back to the default servlet when none of Guice-configured servlet matches the requested URL. This technique can be used to serve static resources from an Guice-configured web app. For example, assuming this simple web.xml that routes everything through Guice:

<webapp>
  <listener>
    <listener-class>com.myapp.MyGuiceContextListener</listener-class>
  </listener>
  <filter>
    <filter-name>guiceFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.google.inject.servlet.GuiceFilter</filter-class>
  </filter>
</webapp>

If we have a file named myIndex.html at the same directory level with WEB-INF in the web app layout, we can then easily request this file by using an URL like this:

http://mydomain/myIndex.html

In this case, the GuiceFilter is smart enough to reroute the request to the default servlet for serving the myIndex.html file.