Summary

The goal of this chapter was to provide you with a general background of the foundational elements upon which the servlet specification is built. As a result, we covered a significant amount of ground in the course of this chapter.

We began with a tour of the characteristics of an enterprise application that make it a particularly unique problem domain, requiring the special attention of an entire set of APIs, all of which are packaged conveniently in the Java Enterprise Edition Platform specification.

We then took a high level overview of the HTTP version 1.1 and noted that it was a connection oriented, stateless protocol. We saw the methods it defines, as well as with the structure of the request and response that form the core of the protocol.

Finally, we reviewed JSR 154, the Servlet 2.5 specification that forms the requirements that any Java EE compliant servlet container should implement. We looked at the core classes that form the basis of the Servlet API and the basic building blocks such as filters, sessions, and listeners. We ended with a quick tour of a basic web application and its deployment descriptor.