Difference between URLs: /? and /login?

Hi!
Could some one explain the difference between the following urls?
www.example.com/? and www.example.com/login?
Thanks!

Faisal,
One goes to the server root and the other goes to a path. I don't think I understand the question.

Thanks for replying!
Well, my question is:
? separates the path and parameters. For this url: http://www.example.com/login?fs=1&view=tl it is very clear that we are passing parameters to "login" servlet.
I didn't understand this url: https://mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&view=tl Here to whom are we passing parameters?
Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi Faisal.
In the web application scenario,

www.example.com/

is server root, and

www.example.com/login

is application root.

Hi Faisal.
In

https://mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&view=tl

I think gmail application adds these parameters and redirects it to the client. Then the client is sending request to the server with these parameters.

Chinmay!

Thanks for your reply. Could you please elaborate?

Thanks again!

Hi Faisal.
I think in gmail application, the redirection happens like this(this is my assumption, there may be better approaches than this),

Here attributes 'paramOne' and 'paramTwo' are set some where in the application.

Chinmaya Chowdary wrote:Hi Faisal.
I think in gmail application, the redirection happens like this(this is my assumption, there may be better approaches than this),
<c:url var="var" value="/mail"> <c:param name="fs" value="${paramOne}"/> <c:param name="view" value="${paramTwo}"/> </c:url> <% String redirectUrl=(String)pageContext.getAttribute("var"); response.sendRedirect(redirectUrl); %>
Here attributes 'paramOne' and 'paramTwo' are set some where in the application.

I do not think this explanation is correct; it still did not explain why thhe url appears as
https://mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&view=tl

If a redirect had occured to the mail page, one would have expected some thing like
https://mail.google.com/mail?fs=1&view=tl

I am not buying your explanation yet.

Hi Anselm.
I am sorry, here 'value' attribute of <c:url > tag is not '/mail', it is '/' in <c:url > tag.
In

https://mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&view=tl

the part

https://mail.google.com

signifies server root, the part

/mail

signifies application root, and the part

/?fs=1&view=tl

signifies query string.

Now we are in 'mail' web application, and one of its jsp wants to do redirect, and it can be done by
.

In the above code the JSTL's <c:url >tag is used for URL rewriting and URL encoding. At the end it produces

/mail/?fs=1&view=tl

with 'jsessionid' if the client disables cookies(like /mail/;jsessionid=...) and sets the attribute 'var' in page scope like,
Here the values '1' and 'tl' are produced by 'paramOne' and 'paramTwo' that are set some where in the application.

Now we have to get the attribute 'var' that was set in the page socpe. It can be done by Now we have the URL and we are about to redirect it by using response object's sendRedirect(String str) method, like Now the redirection wil happens. During redirecting, the client(browser) sends the request to the server by using the url

https://mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&view=tl

Now the DD checks the url pattern, here it is '/'(default servlet) and finds the appropriate servlet and sends the parameters 'fs=1&view=tl' to it, process it and finally the response will be sent to the client.

For me, the only difference between www.example.com/login/? and www.example.com/login? is that the first one will map to a servlet mapped to /login/* and the other one is mapped to /login. So basically both the paths can map to a servlet (this is of course if the application on this domain is mapped to ROOT)...

Chinmay!
Thanks for your explanation and time.

Ankit!
Thank you.

Both of your replies helped me a lot in clearing my doubt.

Chinmay, I just came to know you've recently passed SCWCD. That was a great score. Cheers!

Thanks again!

Thankyou Faisal.