TomCat 6: can welcome page be inside WEB-INF?

Question

I'm following this example to get Spring up & running: http://static.springsource.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/part2.html

What they do is move all .jsp files inside the WEB-INF, to stop users accessing them directly... so far so good. However the servlet has a welcome page of index.jsp, and when this is moved inside the WEB-INF dir I get errors. I can't determine if Tomcat 6 should allow the welcome page to be inside WEB-INF or not?

Answer 1

Nothing inside WEB-INF can be directly accessed, but must first pass through something else (usually a servlet), which then forwards the request internally to the WEB-INF resource.

Answer 2

Why not having an jsp in welcome-file-list where it forwards to spring resource?

Answer 3

I am trying the same tutorial. The tutorial doesn't say this but I changed the value in my web.xml from "index.jsp" to "/WEB-INF/jsp/index.jsp".