JavaServer Faces

Servlets, Filters, and Listeners

All new Java web-tier technologies, such as JSP, JSF, and portlets, are defined on top of the API that started it all: the Servlet API. A servlet is a Java class that processes a request from a client and produces a response. Most implementations of the JSF specification use a servlet as the entry-point for the page requests, and some JSF-based applications may also include a few servlets and other classes defined by the servlet specification, such as listeners and filters.

The Servlet API is general enough to allow servlets to deal with any request/response-based protocol, but it’s almost exclusively used with HTTP. The API consists of two packages: the javax.servlet package contains classes and interfaces that are protocol-independent, while the javax.servlet.http package provides HTTP-specific extensions and utility classes.

For HTTP processing, one class and two interfaces make up the bulk of the API:

javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet

This is the base class for most servlets. It contains empty default implementations of two methods that can be overridden by a subclass for initialization and release of internal resources used by a servlet: init() and destroy( ). The init() method is called once before the servlet is asked to process its first request, and the destroy() method is called just before the servlet is taken out of service.

The base class also provides default implementations of the request processing methods, one for each HTTP request type: doGet( ), doPost(), doDelete( ), doHead(), doOptions( ), doPut(), and doTrace( ). Most subclasses override the doGet() and doPost() methods (or at least one of them) to handle the corresponding HTTP request types, but rely on the default implementations for the other request types.

javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest

This interface represents the HTTP request, with methods for reading request parameters, headers, and the request URL. Other methods let you add, read, and remove application data—called request attributes—associated with the request. This mechanism comes in handy when the servlet delegates some of the processing (e.g., the rendering of the response) to another application class, as I describe later.

javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse

This interface represents the HTTP response sent back to the client. It provides methods for setting response headers and obtaining a stream for the response body.

The web container loads the servlet class—either when the container is started or when the first request for the servlet is received—and calls its methods, converting raw HTTP request messages into HttpServletRequest objects and HttpServletResponse objects into raw HTTP response messages. It’s important to realize that the container creates only one instance of each servlet. This means that the servlet must be thread safe—able to handle multiple requests at the same time, each executing as a separate thread through the servlet code.