welcome-file-list + facelets question

[Kalman Hazins <kh...@chessys.com>]

Hi, group.

I am just starting out on the long Facelets/JSF path and have the following
(simple I hope) question.

I have a login.xhtml page in my .../webapps/myproj directory on Tomcat 5.5.
I have configured facelets to work for my application and the following
works just fine

http://localhost/myproj/login.jsf

I would like the following to work as well

http://localhost/myproj/

and go to my login.xhtml page.

However, when I add login.jsf to the welcome-file-list element in the
web.xml file - it does not work.

I have read that the workaround is to add a dummy/empty login.jsf file and
that seems to do it, but do not understand WHY the dummy file has to be in
there. 

It's almost like it's looking for an actual file (login.jsf) file to be
there, but why? The 2.4 servlet specification allows you to place a servlet
name in the welcome-file-list which is obviously just a mapping, so why
would login.jsf (mapping) be any worse?

Thanx, 
   - Kalman