Professional Java Servlets 2.3

Overview

As enterprise components, our servlets will often have to work with data from persistent resources. These resources could be relational databases, directory services, or XML repositories.

In this chapter we'll discuss how we can handle these resources within the servlet container. In doing so, we'll illustrate design patterns and solutions to programming issues that you can put to use in your own applications.

In particular, we will look at how to:

• Configure our servlets using XML descriptors and initialization parameters

• Bind external resources to logical names using a naming and directory service

• Access persistent data stores (such as a relational database) from within our servlet applications

• Persist the state of a servlet when the server is shutdown, including HTTP request information

We'll begin with a brief discussion of the technologies we will be working with as a detailed discussion of all the technologies we work with in this chapter would require a book of its own. The intent of this chapter is simply to illustrate the use of these technologies in a servlet scenario.