Servlet Filter to Set Response Headers

Frequent requirement when developing Java web apps is to set different response headers based of on content type / URL. Last project it was to set cache headers on dynamic URLs so they will never be cached and today I had to do the opposite for static content, where cache headers were set on static content so they will be cached for a very long time by the browsers.

It's basically the same thing but just setting different response header values. So I decided to write a general purpose Servlet filter to achieve this in a few lines.



We configure the filter in web.xml and set the required response header / value pair as init params


Here we are setting the Cache-Control response header and setting the expiry date to 1 year from request time. Now we add the appropriate filter mapping to apply the filter to static content we are interested in.


And we are done. In summary all we are doing here is setting cache headers to all static content like .js, .css etc... so they will be cached by the client browsers for a very long time making the pages load faster and reducing the bandwidth usage / load on the server significantly.

Please note you shouldn't add far future cache expiration dates if you plan to make changes to the static content at any time as the modified content might not be downloaded by client browsers. The strategy we take is to make a new copy of the file when we modify and link to the new file. e.g. style-1.1.css when modified will be made site-1.2.css,