What is the best way to allow both a servlet and client-side scripts read the same file?

Question

We want to share user validation configuration between a Java validation class (for sanity checking) and a Javascript-enabled form web interface (for usability). What's the best way to deploy this static file in our web application so that it is both available to the server-side code, and available via a URL accessed by the client?

So far I've thought of putting the file in the application root and pointing the validation class at it when it is used, and putting the file in the WEB-INF/classes directory and somehow configuring the container to serve it.

Has anyone else configured a web application like this? What did you end up doing?

Answer 1

Yeah. Put it in the WEB-INF/classes and have a servlet serve out the relevant portion of the validation configurations based on something like a form-id. Better yet, have the servlet transform the configuration into a JSON object and then you can simply include a script tag and start using it :)