Best practices to store and access resource files in java web application

Question

I have a bunch of text, xml and other files (i.e. resources) that I need to access using servlets in java web app. For example, there is an xml file, a part of which is returned with a servlet by a user query. I am using Tomcat. What is the best practice to store these files and access them from java code? 1) What are the default folders where should I put them, do I need to put them into Web archive or into one of the Jars? 2) How to access the files from java code? How can I set the path to them so it will work in any environment? P.S. I've read a number of posts related to this topic, most of which recommend to store resources in jars and access them using java.lang.Class.getResourceAsStream(String). It seems strange because classes and data should be separated.

Answer 1

It's perfectly fine to load static resources using the classloader. That's what ResourceBundle does to load the internationalized properties files for example.

Put them in WEB-INF/classes along with your class files, or in a jar inside WEB-INF/lib, and load them with the ClassLoader as indicated by the answers you already read.

That doesn't forbid you to place these files in a separate directory from the Java source files in your project. The build process should just make sure to put them in the appropriate location for runtime. The Maven and Gradle convention is to put the source files under src/main/java and the resource files under src/main/resources.