URL rewriting solution needed for JSF

Question

Suppose the following application landscape:

+-----------------+
| App server      |
+-----------------+
|                 |                                   +-------+
| ear1            |                                   |       |
|  +-web1 (/ctx1) +--<-- http://localhost/ctx1/xxx/ --+       +--<-- http://www.example.com/xxx/
|                 |                                   |       |
|                 |                                   | proxy |
| ear2            |                                   |       |
|  +-web2 (/ctx2) +--<-- http://localhost/ctx2/yyy/ --+       +--<-- http://abc.example.com/yyy/
|                 |                                   |       |
+-----------------+                                   +-------+

As you can see, proxy (nginx in my case) is forwarding requests to to a single application server instance, which in turn has multiple web modules with different context paths. Of course I dont want my public server to expose internal context roots and proxy does it's job well, wraps and unwraps http requests, etc. But there is still one big problem: JSF-generated html code (links, css, js resources, form actions) contains context paths, /ctx1 and /ctx2 in my case. That's what I want to avoid.

I nave no solution at this moment of time except of using more and more different instances (domains) of application server, causing my hardware resources to fade away. As i understand it, I need to extend my JSF applications with some wrappers, potentially registered in faces-config.xml, which would remove context prefix in generated html. Any other solutions are also welcome.

Please point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

You can use OCPsoft Rewrite URLRewriteFilter for this (not PrettyFaces currently, but you can use them both at the same time until they formally join together after PrettyFaces 4 release - Rewrite is the core project for PrettyFaces 4)

Doing something like this should be fairly straightforward using a single configuration rule. You can obviously fiddle if this rule is either too strict or too general.

.defineRule()
.when(URL.matches("{prefix}" + context.getContextPath() + "{suffix}")
.perform(Substitute.with("{prefix}{suffix}"))

Check out the rewrite site. It's pretty easy to set up. http://ocpsoft.org/rewrite/