URL Redirection and Rewriting with Regular Expressions

Web Server 7.0 introduces enhanced support for regular expressions and conditional processing in the obj.conf configuration file.

Key enhancements include the following:

• Support for regular expressions

• A restart Server Application Function (SAF) for restarting requests with a new URI

• Support for dynamic SAF parameters that include expressions, variables, regular expression back references

• <If>, <ElseIf>, and <Else> tags for conditional processing

• Support for complex conditions that use and, or, and notoperators

• sed-request and sed-response filters for rewriting request and response bodies

You can use these new features to define flexible URL rewriting and redirection rules such as those possible with mod_rewrite from the Apache HTTP server. Unlike mod_rewrite, regular expressions and conditional processing in Web Server 7.0 can be used at any stage of request processing, even with third-party plug-ins.

For more information on regular expressions and URL rewrite functions, see the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Update 6 Administrator’s Configuration File Reference.