[opencms-dev] URL handling

[Christian Steinert]

Dear all

one of the things that I am unhappy with in opencms is that there is no 
abstraction between URLs and file system resources.

Has anybody in a project implemented some mapping between logical and 
physical URLs? If so, which technique did you use? Servlet filters?

Did anybody successfully implement in a custom 404-handler in opencms? 
Maybe even in a way that works with static export? I am not looking for 
code here, I only try to figure out, how I could create a custom mapping 
of URLs against cms resources, without touching the CMS core and without 
messing around with external things like mod_rewrite.

One thing that would already be a huge improvement is, if resources 
could be addressed like folders, as it is possible in Apache. For 
example, if I have a JSP resource called /foo/bar  and if a request is 
issued for /foo/bar/baz,then it would be incredibly helpful, if actually 
/foo/bar were called. This would very easily allow to create mappers for 
custom url spaces. Does anybody else think this is a good idea? At least 
the request handling and the link management of opencms would be 
affected by this, I think. Also, I don't know how expensive this would 
become, since a naive traversal of the filesystem, whenever a resource 
is not found might cause too much DB activity.

Nonetheless, I wanted to ask, what others think of this.

Kind regards
Christian