HTTP is the communication protocol between server and client. HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP communication protocol.
Port numbers 0 to 1023 are reserved ports for well known services, for example 80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS, 21 for FTP etc.
Java Servlet and JSPs are server side technologies to extend the capability of web servers by providing support for dynamic response and data persistence.
Web Container
When web container gets the request and if it’s for servlet then container creates two Objects HTTPServletRequest and HTTPServletResponse. Then it finds the correct servlet based on the URL and creates a thread for the request. Then it invokes the servlet service() method and based on the HTTP method service() method invokes doGet() or doPost() methods. Servlet methods generate the dynamic page and write it to response. Once servlet thread is complete, container converts the response to HTTP response and send it back to client.
Some of the important work done by web container are:
Communication Support – Container provides easy way of communication between web server and the servlets and JSPs. Because of container, we don’t need to build a server socket to listen for any request from web server, parse the request and generate response. All these important and complex tasks are done by container and all we need to focus is on our business logic for our applications.
Lifecycle and Resource Management – Container takes care of managing the life cycle of servlet. Container takes care of loading the servlets into memory, initializing servlets, invoking servlet methods and destroying them. Container also provides utility like JNDI for resource pooling and management.
Multithreading Support – Container creates new thread for every request to the servlet and when it’s processed the thread dies. So servlets are not initialized for each request and saves time and memory.
JSP Support – JSPs doesn’t look like normal java classes and web container provides support for JSP. Every JSP in the application is compiled by container and converted to Servlet and then container manages them like other servlets.
Miscellaneous Task – Web container manages the resource pool, does memory optimizations, run garbage collector, provides security configurations, support for multiple applications, hot deployment and several other tasks behind the scene that makes our life easier.
Java Web Applications are packaged as Web Archive (WAR) and it has a defined structure.
Servlet
Servlet API Hierarchy
Session Management
What is a Session?
HTTP protocol and Web Servers are stateless, what it means is that for web server every request is a new request to process and they can’t identify if it’s coming from client that has been sending request previously.
Session is a conversional state between client and server and it can consists of multiple request and response between client and server. Since HTTP and Web Server both are stateless, the only way to maintain a session is when some unique information about the session (session id) is passed between server and client in every request and response.
JSESSIONID Cookie
When we use HttpServletRequest getSession() method and it creates a new request, it creates the new HttpSession object and also add a Cookie to the response object with name JSESSIONID and value as session id. This cookie is used to identify the HttpSession object in further requests from client. If the cookies are disabled at client side and we are using URL rewriting then this method uses the jsessionid value from the request URL to find the corresponding session. JSESSIONID cookie is used for session tracking, so we should not use it for our application purposes to avoid any session related issues.
When a JSP resource is used, container automatically creates a session for it, so we can’t check if session is null to make sure if user has come through login page, so we are using session attribute to validate request.
As we saw in last section that we can manage a session with HttpSession but if we disable the cookies in browser, it won’t work because server will not receive the JSESSIONID cookie from client.
Cookie Basics
a cookie is a small piece of data stored on the client-side which servers use when communicating with clients.They’re used to identify a client when sending a subsequent request. They can also be used for passing some data from one servlet to another.
