IIRC, the concern was that a JAX-RS app deployed at with a mapping of /* would hide any other content in the web application. E.g. if a developer added a JSP or a servlet it wouldn't be reachable.
Marc.
On Feb 18, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Moises Lejter wrote:
> The changelog for JAX-RS 1.1 says,
>
> It is RECOMMENDED that implementations support the Servlet 3 framework pluggability mechanism to enable portability between containers and to avail themselves of container-supplied class scanning facilities. When using the pluggability mechanism the following conditions MUST be met:
> • If no Application subclass is present the added servlet MUST be named "javax.ws.rs.core.Application" and all root resource classes and providers packaged in the web application MUST be included in the published JAX-RS application. The application MUST be packaged with a web.xml that specifies a servlet mapping for the added servlet.
> Though I have to confess I think I misread this: I thought that a web application with JAX-RS resources: (1) would not need an Application class, in which case all resources would be included
> (2) would magically find a new servlet named "javax.ws.rs.core.Application" added to its configuration at run time
> (3) *could* include only a <servlet-mapping> in its web.xml, for the magic entry in (2) - but would default to "/"
>
> Which I think is the behavior Arun expected, too. But I think my mistake was in (3) - in looking back at the quote from the changelog, it seems that there *must* be an explicit mapping in web.xml for the magic entry for the servlet in (2), even if it is just "/".
>
> So I am with Arun - why not default it to "/" ?
>
> Moises