Servlet Q & A

   1. What is the servlet?

      Servlets are modules that extend request/response-oriented servers, such as Java-enabled web servers. For example, a servlet may be responsible for taking data in an HTML order-entry form and applying the business logic used to update a company’s order database.

   2. What’s the difference between servlets and applets?

      Servlets are to servers; applets are to browsers. Unlike applets, however, servlets have no graphical user interface.

   3. What’s the advantages using servlets than using CGI?

      Servlets provide a way to generate dynamic documents that is both easier to write and faster to run. It is efficient, convenient, powerful, portable, secure and inexpensive. Servlets also address the problem of doing server-side programming with platform-specific APIs: they are developed with Java Servlet API, a standard Java extension.

   4. What are the uses of Servlets?

      A servlet can handle multiple requests concurrently, and can synchronize requests. This allows servlets to support systems such as on-line conferencing. Servlets can forward requests to other servers and servlets. Thus servlets can be used to balance load among several servers that mirror the same content, and to partition a single logical service over several servers, according to task type or organizational boundaries.

   5. What’s the Servlet Interface?

      The central abstraction in the Servlet API is the Servlet interface. All servlets implement this interface, either directly or, more commonly, by extending a class that implements it such as HttpServlet. Servlets–>Generic Servlet–>HttpServlet–>MyServlet. The Servlet interface declares, but does not implement, methods that manage the servlet and its communications with clients. Servlet writers provide some or all of these methods when developing a servlet.

   6. When a servlet accepts a call from a client, it receives two objects. What are they?

      ServeltRequest: which encapsulates the communication from the client to the server.
      ServletResponse: which encapsulates the communication from the servlet back to the client.
      ServletRequest and ServletResponse are interfaces defined by the javax.servlet package.

Read Full Post »