Introduction | Servlets & HTTP | Life-Cycle | Sessions | Summary | Examples

That's A Wrap!

What's Been Covered: The servlet seminar aims to provide developers with a no nonsense introduction to Java Servlets. We began by answering the question, why servlets? For this we constrasted servlets with the well established Perl/CGI web server combination and highlighted that they is a need for better performing web server extensions to cope with today's high volume, transactional Internet sites.

Once we understood why we needed servlets, we defined what one is. A servlet as a server extension, that has the performance advantages of server extensions written to ISAPI and NSAPI but with the portability and full resources of the Java Platform. Servlets are also easier to maintain, more reliable and more security than CGI, NSAPI and ISAPI. The remaining parts of the servlet seminar described the servlet life-cycle and how they can be used to maintain state within the stateless world of the Internet.

What Hasn't Been Covered: Unfortunately, we have only just scratched the surface of servlets. We didn't cover the processing of multi-media content, the generation of in-memory images, how to enforce security in your servlets, communication between servlets and applets, inter-servlet communication, remote servlets, web applications, servlet chaining and filters, server-side includes, internationalisation, sending email from a servlet, uploading files, accessing databases from within a servlet, debugging servlets, creating well-behaved and high performing servlets, and so on...

Please let us know if there is anything you would like covered, and will pop it in our todo list for next month's What's Next? section.

Enjoy!
zameer.ahmad@yahoo.com