Servlet Internals

How does a Servlet work?

A URL request (= user clicked on a link) arrives at the web server. From the configuration the server can tell the request needs to be passed on to the Servlet container. The Servlet container creates or reuses an instance of the Servlet. A Servlet is a Java object associated with an URL (as defined in the Servlet container configuration in web.xml).

The HTTP request, packaged into a request object, is passed to the Servlet which writes its HTML response into the response object. The Servlet container produces a proper HTTP response from the response object, and forwards it to the web server which passes it on to the browser.

Voila!

Remarks:

• Since Servlets are a Java technology, Servlets are always written in Java.