: Is there an easy way without out writing custom response writers to accept a : parameter on the request URL and then substitute that value in the response?
there's nothing built in to support this using the syntax you are asking about, but one approach to consider instead of writing a custom response writer would be to use the VeolicityResponseWriter with a template that does the variable evaluation an then formats it into xml/json/whatever. Assuming you want your final output to be XML, i think this would also be fairly trivially with an XSLT (either server side or client side) if you use echoParams. (your template just needs to look at the params section of the responseHeader to know what to use as a substituion applied to all <str> nodes) -Hoss
