JBoss overlay does not support JSP recompilation

Environment

• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)
  • 6.x

Issue

• We've configured an overlay in our application's WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml. JSPs in this overlay directory is never recompiled as expected per our web subsystem's jsp configuration settings (development and modification-test-interval).

Resolution

• Overlays do not support JSP recompilation by design currently.
• An alternative method of serving JSPs outside of your application is to use a symlink as described in the following article. This symlink served content does support JSP recompilation.

Root Cause

• Overlays are designed to serve as external content libraries; their lookups are expensive so overlay content is cached permanently and never reloaded. Thus, overlays do not support JSP recompilation as the updated JSP is never loaded. You can see here the permanent caching for Overlay content in the ProxyDirContext source:

    // Set timestamp
    if (currentContext == dirContext) {
        entry.timestamp = System.currentTimeMillis() + cacheTTL;
    } else {
        // Overlay cache never expire
        entry.timestamp = Long.MAX_VALUE;
    }
  

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