[Term of the Day]: Servlet Engine
Term of the Day
"Servlet Engine"
What is Servlet Engine?
Servlet engine, also known as the servlet container is a java technology managed by a container that runs on a web server or an application server to deliver dynamic contents.
Usually, every servlet enabled web server will have a servlet engine working together with the webserver to handle all HTTP requests from clients.
Here is how a typical Servlet container works:
1) A client sends an HTTP request to the Web server.
2) The web server looks at the pathname of the request. If it knows how to handle the request,
it will send back the HTTP response.
3) If the request refers to a pathname managed by the Servlet container, then the Web server forwards the request to the Servlet engine.
4) The Servlet engine looks at the pathname of the request and calls the Java Servlet class that is mapped to the pathname.
5) The Java Servlet class then executes its programmed logic to generate the HTTP response and sends it to the webserver.
6) The web server sends the response via HTTP back to the client.
There are several servlet engines and some commonly used are Jboss, Apache Tomcat, WebLogic and so on.
The benefits of servlet engines are numerous, refer to this article to learn more.