I have a J2EE application that I am building with Spring and Maven. It has the usual project structure. Here is a bit of the hierarchy.

MyApplication
    src
        main
            webapp
                WEB-INF
                    layout
                        header.jsp
                styles
                    main.css

I want to include that CSS file in my JSP. I have the following tag in place.

<c:url var="styleSheetUrl" value="/styles/main.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="${styleSheetUrl}">

When I deploy the application, the CSS page isn't being located. When I view the page source, the href is /MyApplication/styles/main.css. Looking inside the WAR, there is a /styles/main.css. However, I get a 404 when I try to access the CSS file directly in the browser.

I discovered that the reason for the issue was the Dispatcher Servlet mapping. The mapping looks as follows.

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

I imagine the Dispatcher Servlet doesn't know how to handle the CSS request. What is the best way to handle this issue? I would rather not have to change all of my request mappings.