Preprocessing JSP pages

[Edward Hibbert <Ed...@dataconnection.com>]

Perhaps you can help me.

We have an application which used Tomcat v4, which I'm migrating to use 5.5.9.  We made some changes to the Tomcat source to allow JSP pages to be preprocessed, so that we could strip out/add in certain code branches at runtime based on configuration.  We did this by making changes to e.g. ParserController.java.

In retrospect this wasn't a great idea, because it meant we had to ship our own version of Tomcat, so we're looking at removing these changes so that we can use a vanilla version of Tomcat.

I can roll my own different version of this preprocessing, e.g. as part of starting Tomcat.  But I'm wondering whether there's a way you're "supposed" to do something like this?  E.g. is there a way you can register something to get invoked when Tomcat is loading JSP, without having to hack the code to do so?

Thanks for any help,

Edward Hibbert.