How does the webserver ensures to serve the static content ?

Webserver does not understand on its own :). I'll suggest you read about the plugin to understand it. It's very well explained there.

By a URL a web server does not know if its static asset or to be redirected the app server, its the config in plugin-cfg.xml. Here is a high level flow:

1) Request reached Webserver and is first given to plugin to handle the request.
2) Plugin compares the URL to the Virtual host and corresponding URL mapping in plugin-cfg.xml. If a match is found, it is sent to the app server else given back to the web server to handle.
3) Web server tries to serve such request from the configured DocumentRoot.


Now if you want to server static assets thru web server, make sure your static assets URL are not there in the generated plugin.

you must to set the fileServingEnabled WAR archive property to true or false. If you set false you must to copy all application static content into webserver and configure properly the <virtual host> entry (set folder)