The Advantages of Servlets

• Efficient– Threads instead of OS processes, one servlet copy
• Convenient–Lots of high-level utilities
• Powerful–Sharing data, pooling, persistence
• Portable– Run on virtually all operating systems and servers
• Inexpensive–There are plenty of free and low-cost servers
• Secure–No shell escapes, no buffer overflows
• Mainstream–See next page

A Servlet’s Job

• Read explicit data sent by client (form data)
• Read implicit data sent by client (request headers)
• Generate the results
• Send the explicit data back to client (HTML)
• Send the implicit data to client (status codes and response headers)