getResourceAsStream and relative paths in web.xml

[Timothy Stone <ci...@petmystone.com>]

List,

I'm following a twist on some advice that I got from Yoav Shapira. But 
in playing to learn more I ran across something that I have not been 
able to solve from reading the documentation.

I want to put the relative path to a user=password property file in the 
web.xml. Given:

#web.xml
...
   <servlet>
     <servlet-name>ProtectedPage</servlet-name>
     <servlet-class>coreservlets.ProtectedPage</servlet-class>
     <init-param>
       <param-name>passwordFile</param-name>
       <param-value>/WEB-INF/lib/passwords.properties</param-value>
       <!-- want to avoid making this absolute to the file system.
            i.e. "c:\path\to\file"; naturally this is ugly and not
            portable.
       -->
     </init-param>
   </servlet>
...

So I got this to work:
...
   public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
     super.init(config);
       try {
          this.passwordFile = config.getInitParameter( "passwordFile" );
          this.passwords = new Properties();
          passwords.load( config.getServletContext()
                                .getResourceAsStream( passwordFile ) );
       } catch( IOException ioe ) {}
   }
...

*But* this did not work, which I guess is a "relative issue":

...
   public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
     super.init(config);
       try {
          this.passwordFile = config.getInitParameter( "passwordFile" );
          this.passwords = new Properties();
          passwords.load( new FileInputStream( passwordFile );
       } catch( IOException ioe ) {}
   }
...

Can someone summarize why the second example does not work with relative 
paths? I understand why the first one does.

TIA
Tim



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