An Introduction to Java Servlets - Servlets to the rescue!
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The Servlet API was developed to leverage the advantages of the Java platform to solve the issues of CGI and proprietary APIs. It's a simple API supported by virtually all Web servers and even load-balancing, fault-tolerant Application Servers. It solves the performance problem by executing all requests as threads in one process, or on a load-balanced system, as one process per server in the cluster. Servlets can easily share resources, as you will see in this article.
In terms of servlets, security is improved in many ways. First of all, you rarely need to execute shell commands with user-supplied data since the Java API provide access to all commonly used functions. You can use JavaMail to read and send email, Java Database Connect (JDBC) to access databases, the File class and related classes to access the file system, RMI, CORBA and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) to access legacy systems, etc.
The Java security model makes it possible to implement fine-grained access controls, for instance only allowing access to a well-defined part of the file system. Java's exception handling also makes a servlet more reliable than proprietary C/C++ APIs - a divide by zero is reported as an error instead of crashing the Web server.
Next: The servlet runtime environment >>
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