The Basic Servlet Architecture

THE BASIC SERVLET ARCHITECTURE

A Servlet, in its most general form, is an instance of a class which implements the javax.servlet.Servlet interface. Most Servlets, however, extend one of the standard implementations of that interface, namely javax.servlet.GenericServlet and javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet. In this tutorial we'll be discussing only HTTP Servlets which extend the javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet class.

Servlets make use of the Java standard extension classes in the packages javax.servlet (the basic Servlet framework) and javax.servlet.http (extensions of the Servlet framework for Servlets that answer HTTP requests). Since Servlets are written in the highly portable Java language and follow a standard framework, they provide a means to create sophisticated server extensions in a server and operating system independent way.

Typical uses for HTTP Servlets include:

Processing and/or storing data submitted by an HTML form.

Providing dynamic content, e.g. returning the results of a database query to the client.

Managing state information on top of the stateless HTTP, e.g. for an online shopping cart system which manages shopping carts for many concurrent customers and maps every request to the right customer.

Servlets vs CGI

The traditional way of adding functionality to a Web Server is the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a language-independent interface that allows a server to start an external process which gets information about a request through environment variables, the command line and its standard input stream and writes response data to its standard output stream. Each request is answered in a separate process by a separate instance of the CGI program, or CGI script (as it is often called because CGI programs are usually written in interpreted languages like Perl).

Servlets have several advantages over CGI:

A Servlet does not run in a separate process. This removes the overhead of creating a new process for each request.

A Servlet stays in memory between requests. A CGI program (and probably also an extensive runtime system or interpreter) needs to be loaded and started for each CGI request.

There is only a single instance which answers all requests concurrently. This saves memory and allows a Servlet to easily manage persistent data.

A Servlet can be run by a Servlet Engine in a restrictive Sandbox (just like an Applet runs in a Web Browser's Sandbox) which allows secure use of untrusted and potentially harmful Servlets.

In order to initialize a Servlet, a server application loads the Servlet class (and probably other classes which are referenced by the Servlet) and creates an instance by calling the no-args constructor. Then it calls the Servlet's init(ServletConfig config) method. The Servlet should performe one-time setup procedures in this method and store the ServletConfig object so that it can be retrieved later by calling the Servlet's getServletConfig() method. This is handled by GenericServlet. Servlets which extend GenericServlet (or its subclass HttpServlet) should call super.init(config) at the beginning of the init method to make use of this feature. The ServletConfig object contains Servlet parameters and a reference to the Servlet's ServletContext.