The Resources element represents the web
application static resources, from which classes will be loaded,
HTML, JSP and the other static files will be served. This allows the webapp
to reside on various mediums other than the filesystem, like compressed
in a WAR file, in a JDBC database, or in a more advanced versioning
repository.
A unified caching engine is provided for all accesses to the webapp
resources made by the servlet container and web applications which use the
container provided mechanisms to access such resources, such as class loader
access, access through the ServletContext
interface, or native
access through the DirectoryContext
interface.
Note: Running a webapp with non-filesystem based
Resources implementations is only possible when the webapp does not
rely on direct filesystem access to its own resources, and uses the methods
in the ServletContext interface to access them.
A Resources element MAY be nested inside a
Context component. If it is not included,
a default filesystem based Resources will be created automatically,
which is sufficient for most requirements.