What geronimo-web.xml does in WebSphere?

Question

Recently I deployed a web app in WebSphere Community Edition v3. Eclipse smartly created geronimo-web.xml and web.xml. In JSF 2.0 we learned about the use of web.xml but what is the use of geronimo-web.xml? Can I ignore this file and simply remove from the app?

Answer 1

It's a server-specific deployment configuration file which allows you to configure server-specific properties from inside the deployed web application, such as class loading, character encoding, JNDI resources, etcetera.

Other servers have also this kind of server-specific configuration files. Glassfish has glassfish-web.xml, Tomcat has context.xml, etc. IBM Websphere CE uses Apache Geronimo as container.

You can just remove it if you want, but why would you?

See also:

• Apache Geronimo geronimo-web.xml documentation

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Please note that the web.xml is not specific to JSF API, but to the Servlet API. JSF has the faces-config.xml.