Java Cookbook

JavaServer Pages Using a Servlet

Problem

It may seem that servlets and JSPs are mutually exclusive, but in fact they work well together. You can reduce the amount of Java coding in your JSP by passing control from a servlet to a JSP.

Solution

Use the Model-View-Controller paradigm, and implement it using ServletDispatcher().forward( ) .

Discussion

Model-View-Controller is a paradigm for building programs that interact well with the user. The Model is an object or collection that represents your data; the View is what the user sees; and the Controller responds to user request. Think of a slide-show (presentation) program: you probably have a text view, a slide view, and a sorter view. Yet when you change the data in any view, all the other views are updated immediately. This is because MVC allows a single model to have multiple views attached to it. MVC provides the basis for most well-designed GUI applications.

Using the Model-View-Controller paradigm, a servlet can be the controller and the JSP can be the view. A servlet, for example, could receive the initial request from the form, interrogate a database based upon the query, construct a collection of objects matching the user’s query, and forward it to a JSP to be displayed (the servlet can attach data it found to the request). A good example of this is a search page, which might have only a few (or even one) form parameters, so using a JSP with a bean to receive the results would be overkill. A better design is to have a servlet ...