Specification of Mappings

In the Web application deployment descriptor, the following syntax is used to define mappings.

A string beginning with a ‘/’ character and ending with a ‘/*’ suffix is used for path mapping.
A string beginning with a ‘*.’ prefix is used as an extension mapping.
A string containing only the ’/’ character indicates the "default" servlet of the application. The servlet path is the request URI minus the context path, and the path info is null.
All other strings are used for exact matches only.