BugRat Report #92 has been filed.

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Bug report #92 has just been filed.

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REPORT #92 Details.

Project: Tomcat
Category: Bug Report
SubCategory: New Bug Report
Class: swbug
State: received
Priority: high
Severity: serious
Confidence: public
Environment: 
   Release: 3.2b3
   JVM Release: Sun 1.3
   Operating System: Win NT
   OS Release: NT 4 SP6
   Platform: intel

Synopsis: 
URLs are case sensitive

Description:
Tomcat 3.2 treats URLs in a case-sensitive manner, which causes severe problems when used with a web server that is case-insensitive, like IIS.

Consider this scenario: IIS serves static pages and Tomcat handles the servlets. The user types a URL for a static page, but enters the URL such that the case of the letters does not match the case of the corresponding file system path. IIS serves the page anyway, because case does not matter. On that page is a link that activates a servlet, and the link is coded in the html as a relative URL.

When the user clicks the link, the relative URL is combined with the URL of the static page to form an absolute URL (I'm not sure if this is done by IIS or by Tomcat, but either way the result is the same). The resulting absolute URL has some elements near the beginning that do not match the case of the corresponding folders, so Tomcat cannot find the servlet.

This causes a major problem because the user can use the site by typing URLs without regard to the case of the letters, and everything works fine until some element of the webapp requires Tomcat, and then the system fails. The programmer has no means to avoid the problem -- even if all URLs in the system match the case of the corresponding file paths, the problem can still occur.

I believe this problem should be fixed by removing the case-sensitivity from Tomcat. If that would cause problems in systems where the file system is case-sensitive, then Tomcat should adapt to the environment and be case-insensitive where the file system and/or web server is insensitive.

For more info, email Steve Fyfe <ma...@CNICorp.com>