Java Programming 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 26Programming with Servlets

Web applications can serve static or dynamic content. Some examples of static content are text files with HTML markup, images, and video. Dynamic content is formed on the fly. Think of a web application that enables you to browse the inventory of an online store. The content you see on your screen is being created based on your queries—in other words, dynamically.

In the Java EE world, web content can be served by a program running in a container with deployed servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces (JSF), or a third-party framework. You can also create a web application by implementing a SOAP or RESTful Web Service. You can also create a web application based on a Plain Old Java Object (POJO) utilizing WebSocket protocol. Servlets, JSP, and JSF not only return the data, but also present it as formatted HTML pages, hence the term presentation layer (refer to Figure 25-1). Web Services or WebSocket-based applications, on the other hand, return just the data (see Chapter 33).

A servlet is a Java class written by certain rules and deployed in a Java EE–compliant servlet container of your choice. The client program can be a lightweight HTML/JavaScript, a heavyweight applet, or a Swing or JavaFX program. This lesson uses the most popular means of web communication: Web browsers talk to servlets using HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

All examples in this lesson work in any servlet container supporting the Servlet 3.1 ...