Servlets are programs that run on a Web or Application server and act as a middle layer between a request coming from a Web browser or other HTTP client and databases or applications on the HTTP server.
A servlet is simply a class which responds to a particular type of network request - most commonly an HTTP request.
Basically, servlets are usually used to implement web applications - but there are also various frameworks which operate on top of servlets (e.g. Struts) to give a higher-level abstraction than the "here's an HTTP request, write to this HTTP response" level which servlets provide.
Servlets run in a servlet container which handles the networking side (e.g. parsing an HTTP request, connection handling etc). One of the best-known open source servlet containers is Tomcat.
The container will take care of things like wrapping the whole thing in a HTTP response object and send it over to the client (say a browser).
The javax.servlet and javax.servlet.http packages provide interfaces and classes for writing servlets. All servlets must implement the Servlet interface, which defines life-cycle methods. When implementing a generic service, you can use or extend the GenericServlet class provided with the Java Servlet API. The HttpServlet class provides methods, such as doGet and doPost, for handling HTTP-specific services.
You do that by writing what-you-want-to-do in the pre-defined methods like init(), doGet(), doPost() etc.
When a Servlet is requested for the first time or when the web app starts up, the servlet container will create an instance of it and keep it in memory during the web app's lifetime.
The same instance will be reused for every incoming request whose URL matches the servlet's URL pattern. You can access the requested data by HttpServletRequest and handle the response by HttpServletResponse. Both objects are available as method arguments inside of any of the overridden methods of HttpServlet, such as doGet() to preprocess a request and doPost() to post-process a request. See also How do servlets work? Instantiation, sessions, shared variables and multithreading.
A servlet is simply a class which responds to a particular type of network request - most commonly an HTTP request.
Basically, servlets are usually used to implement web applications - but there are also various frameworks which operate on top of servlets (e.g. Struts) to give a higher-level abstraction than the "here's an HTTP request, write to this HTTP response" level which servlets provide.
Servlets run in a servlet container which handles the networking side (e.g. parsing an HTTP request, connection handling etc). One of the best-known open source servlet containers is Tomcat.
The container will take care of things like wrapping the whole thing in a HTTP response object and send it over to the client (say a browser).
The javax.servlet and javax.servlet.http packages provide interfaces and classes for writing servlets. All servlets must implement the Servlet interface, which defines life-cycle methods. When implementing a generic service, you can use or extend the GenericServlet class provided with the Java Servlet API. The HttpServlet class provides methods, such as doGet and doPost, for handling HTTP-specific services.
Lifecycle
Servlets are now java classes whose lifecycle will be maintained by the container but their reaction to incoming HTTP requests will be decided by you.You do that by writing what-you-want-to-do in the pre-defined methods like init(), doGet(), doPost() etc.
When a Servlet is requested for the first time or when the web app starts up, the servlet container will create an instance of it and keep it in memory during the web app's lifetime.
The same instance will be reused for every incoming request whose URL matches the servlet's URL pattern. You can access the requested data by HttpServletRequest and handle the response by HttpServletResponse. Both objects are available as method arguments inside of any of the overridden methods of HttpServlet, such as doGet() to preprocess a request and doPost() to post-process a request. See also How do servlets work? Instantiation, sessions, shared variables and multithreading.
Good job
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