Java servlets are making headlines these days, claiming to solve many of the problems associated with CGI and proprietary server API's. In this article Nakul describes the overall servlet architecture and what you need to develop a web application using servlets. He uses several coding examples to show you how to use the servlet API and compares it with CGI and proprietary server API's.
An Introduction to Java Servlets - Request and response objects (Page 6 of 10 )
The doGet method has two interesting parameters: HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse. These two objects give us full access to all information about the request and let us control the output sent to the client as the response to the request.
With CGI you read environment variables and stdin to get information about the request, however the naming convention of environment variables may vary between CGI implementations, and some variables are not provided by all Web servers.
The HttpServletRequest object provides the same information as the CGI environment variables and more, in a standardized way. It also provides methods for extracting HTTP parameters from the query string or the request body depending on the type of request (GET or POST). As a servlet developer, you access parameters the same way for both types of requests. Other methods give you access to all request headers and help you parse date and cookie headers.
Instead of writing the response to stdout as you would with traditional CGI, you receive an OutputStream or a PrintWriter object from the HttpServletResponse. The OuputStream is intended for binary data, such as a GIF or JPEG image, and the PrintWriter for text output. You can also set all response headers and the status code, without having to rely on special Web server CGI configurations such as Non Parsed Headers (NPH). This makes your servlet even easier to install.
Let's implement the body of our doGet method and see how we can use these methods. We will read most of the information we can get from the HttpServletRequest (saving some methods for the next example) and send those values as a response to the request.
The doGet method above uses most of the methods in HttpServletRequest that provide information about the request. You can read all about them in the servlet API documentation so here we'll just look at the most interesting ones.
getParameterNames and getParameterValues help you access HTTP parameters no matter if the servlet was requested with the GET or the POST method. getParameterValues returns a String array because an HTTP parameter may have multiple values. For instance, if you request the servlet with a URL like http://nakul.net/servlet/ReqInfoServlet?foo=bar&foo=baz, then you'll see that the foo parameter has two values: bar and baz. The same is true if you use an identical name for more than one HTML form element and use the POST method in its ACTION tag.
If you're sure that an HTTP parameter can only have one value, then you can use the getParameter method instead of getParameterValues. It returns a single string and if there are multiple values it returns the first value received with the request.
You have access to all HTTP request headers with the getHeaderNames and getHeader methods. getHeader returns the String value of the header. If you know that the header has a date value or an integer value you can get help converting the header to an appropriate format. getDateHeader returns a date as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT. This is the standard numeric representation of a timestamp in Java (as well as Unix), and you can use it to construct a Date object for further manipulation. getIntHeader returns the header value as an int.
getCookies parses the Cookie header and returns all cookies as an array of Cookie objects. To add a cookie to a response, the HttpServletResponse class provides an addCookie method that takes a Cookie object as its argument. This saves you from dealing with the format for different versions of the cookie header string.
If you compile the ReqInfoServlet and install it in your servlet engine, then you can invoke it through a browser with a URL like http://nakul.net/servlet/ReqInfoServlet/foo/bar?fee=baz. If everything goes as planned you will see something like this in your browser:
What if you want this servlet to handle both GET and POST requests? The default implementations of doGet and doPost return a message saying that the method is not yet implemented. So far we have only provided a new implementation of doGet. To handle a POST request in the same way, we can simply call doGet from doPost:
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Developing Your Servlet Skills
