This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Servlet Life Cycle
The key to understanding the low-level functionality of Servlets is to understand the simple life cycle they follow. This life cycle governs the multi-threaded environment that Servlets run in and provides an insight to some of the mechanisms available to a developer for sharing server-side resources. Understanding the Servlet life cycle is also the start of this book's descent to a lower level of discussion, one the majority of this book follows. Functional code examples appear often to illustrate an idea or point. Compiling and running these examples is encouraged to fully understand concepts and to familiarize yourself with Servlets for the later chapters.
The Servlet life cycle (see Figure 2-1) is the primary reason Servlets and also JSP outperform traditional CGI. Opposed to the single-use CGI life cycle, Servlets follow a three-phase life: initialization, service, and destruction, with initialization and destruction typically performed once, and service performed many times.
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Figure 2-1. Diagram of the Servlet Life Cycle
Initialization is the first phase of the Servlet life cycle and represents the creation and initialization of resources the Servlet may need to service requests. All Servlets must implement the javax.servlet.Servlet interface. This interface defines the init() method to match the initialization phase of a Servlet life cycle. When a container loads a Servlet, it invokes the init() method before servicing any requests.
The service phase of the Servlet life cycle represents all interactions with requests until the Servlet is destroyed. The Servlet interface matches the service phase of the Servlet life cycle to the service() method. The service() method of a Servlet is invoked once per a request and is responsible for generating the response to that request. The Servlet specification defines the service() method to take two parameters: a javax.servlet.ServletRequest and a javax.servlet.ServletResponse object. These two objects represent a client's request for the dynamic resource and the Servlet's response to the client. By default a Servlet is multi-threaded, meaning that typically only one instance of a Servlet1 is loaded by a JSP container at any given time. Initialization is done once, and each request after that is handled concurrently2 by threads executing the Servlet's service() method.
The destruction phase of the Servlet life cycle represents when a Servlet is being removed from use by a container. The Servlet interface defines the destroy() method to correspond to the destruction life cycle phase. Each time a Servlet is about to be removed from use, a container calls the destroy() method, allowing the Servlet to gracefully terminate and tidy up any resources it might have created. By proper use of the initialization, service, and destruction phases of the Servlet life cycle, a Servlet can efficiently manage application resources. During initialization a Servlet loads everything it needs to use for servicing requests. The resources are then readily used during the service phase and can then be cleaned up in the destruction phase.
These three events form the Servlet life cycle, but in practice there are more methods a Web developer needs to worry about. Content on the Web is primarily accessed via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). A basic Servlet knows nothing about HTTP, but there is a special implementation of Servlet, javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet, that is designed especially for it.