Continue to this question and aswers : What is WEB-INF used for in a Java web application?
Further question regarding this issue: Beside making my resource private, is there any special reason I should put my JSP files in WEB-INF? Is there any advantage to put my JSP files outside the WEB-INF? I am using Spring framework if it is related to my question.
Short answer: No -- there is no advantage putting the JSPs outside of the WEB-INF folder, when you use a MVC Framework like Spring-MVC. There are only disadvantages: like someone could directly invoke the JSP and could bypass all you functionally that is implemented on top of the Spring-MVC stack,.