Enabling HTTPS for a Spring Google App Engine deployment

Following the previous post on adding Spring to a Google App Engine application, I wanted to add support for the secure HTTPS protocol to the application. It is quite straightforward to do so by simply adding the security-constraint element to the application's web.xml file as shown below/

1. Open up the web.xml file in a text editor e.g. c:\MyProject\myapp\src\main\webapp\WEB-INF\web.xml. Add in the following security-constraint elements.
   
   Note: the example below encrypts the application from the top parent url using the "/*" url pattern.

The development server can only use HTTP, so in order to check the results, the application must be deployed to Google App Engine. As shown below, the Chrome browser shows the HTTPS "padlock" while accessing a URL of the application.