Response Header Lines of Static Files

JSP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples - Version 4.03, by Dr. Herong Yang

JSP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Response Header Lines of Static Files

This section provides tutorial examples of response header lines of static files like hello.html, dot.gif, and hello.pdf. Content-Type header line is set based on file name extension.

Static files can be served directly by Tomcat server, if you copy the files to \local\apache-tomcat-7.0.32\webapps\ROOT. Tomcat server will set "Content_Type" header line based on the file name extension and the MIME settings of the server configuration.

Let's use my test program, HttpRequestGet.java, provided in the previous section to look at response header lines returned by Tomcat 7 server for 3 commonly used file name extensions.

1. Response header lines when requesting .html files:

C:\>java HttpRequestGet /hello.html 8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"38-1047470754000"
Last-Modified: 12:05:54 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 38
Date: 01:43:40 GMT
Connection: close

<html><body>Hello world!</body></html>

Couple of interesting notes here:

Content-Type was set to "text/html", because the file name extension was "html".
The request was marked as HTTP/1.0 in HttpRequestGet, but Tomcat responded with a higher version, HTTP/1.1.
I also tried to use HTTP/1.1 in my request, but Tomcat returned with an error. Why Tomcat could not support HTTP/1.1 request?

2. Response header lines when requesting .gif files:

C:\>java HttpRequestGet /dot.gif 8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"43-1292039810000"
Last-Modified: 03:56:50 GMT
Content-Type: image/gif
Content-Length: 43
Date:  01:48:41 GMT
Connection: close

GIF89a......

As you can see, Content_Type was set correctly to "image/gif" for file name extension "gif", as defined in the MIME settings. I could not included the entire entity body here because it contains binary data.

3. Response header lines when requesting .pdf files:

C:\>java HttpRequestGet /hello.pdf 8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"909-1059333732000"
Last-Modified: 19:22:12 GMT
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Length: 909
Date: 01:51:02 GMT
Connection: close

%PDF-1.3
% ...
4 0 obj
......

Again, Content_Type was set correctly to "application/pdf" for file name extension "pdf", as defined in the MIME settings. I truncated the entity body to save some space.

Last update: 2012.

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About This Book

JSP (JavaServer Pages) Overview

Tomcat 7 Installation on Windows Systems

JSP Scripting Elements

Java Servlet Introduction

JSP Implicit Objects

Syntax of JSP Pages and JSP Documents

JSP Application Session

Managing Cookies in JSP Pages

JavaBean Objects and "useBean" Action Elements