The other week I decided to write some blogging software and
came up with WOBlog. WOBlog is rather different from most
WebObjects apps as it actually has "friendly" URLs. And I don't
mean friendly in the sense that it is using the .../wa/foo/bar/
direct actions but friendly in the sense that if I didn't tell
you and you didn't look at the HTTP headers you'd probably never
know that I'm using WebObjects. WebObjects is vastly different
from standard web server application software. In a typical
IIS/ASP.NET, Apache/PHP, or Apache/PERL configuration the
webserver software is responsible for resolving the URLs to
filesystem paths. Before we detail how WebObjects handles URLs
we should first cover how an ordinary webserver does it. Static
Content in a Document Root The simplest web server program is
one that resolves an incoming URL to a file path on disk then
sends the client the exact contents of that file. So if the
client requests http://example.com/foobar.html the server looks
for /var/www/html/foobar.html and