3/3/2011

Java Servlets

Java Servlets
Big picture
Re-examine the http server project. Your program allow s browers to remotely fetch files and also to launch some java code that ran code on the server machine and sent HTML back by accessing a special URL (/java/...). The java code satisfied the ServerSideJava interface. A servlet is the exact same concept--a piece of Java code that runs on the server in response to a browser request. Servlets support the request/response client/server model and are able to service HTTP GET and POST requests. They are a replacement for CGI bin and php etc... Many dynamic pages on the net are generated by Java code on a server and spit back to the browser, w hich pretends everything is a static file. Another w ay to think of a GET request is as a method call over the internet (this is the basic idea behind REST) where method parameters are URL parameters. The return value is simply the (usually XML) data spit back by the server. For example, here is how to access Yahoo's search engine via their REST interface to find information on the movie Serenity: http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/V1/webSearch?appid=YahooDemo&query=serenity+movie One could view this as an implementation of this method call: WebSearchService.webSearch("YahooDemo", "serenity+movie"); See Creating a REST Request for Y ahoo! Search Web Services for more information. Again, though, REST is just a w ay to think about access dynamic data from the w eb. A POST request is almost the opposite of a GET request: it is meant to send data to the server from HTML forms (i.e., pages w ith <form> tags and submit buttons). POST pages normally process the data and then redirect the brow ser to another page that says anything from "thanks" to "here is your requested data" (like when doing airline reservations). You can think of GET services as display pages and POST services as processing pages. You will have one servlet execute per page for your site; each servlet acquires the appropriate data and then computes an HTML page, w hich is sent back to the browser. Web servers normally follow a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture w here the w eb server is controller, the pages collectively represent the view, and your core system usually embodies the model (such as EmailManager, ...). You can use Jetty or your own HTTP server for this project; I'd recommend Jetty. ;) What is JSP? Java Server Pages are "inside out" servlets where, instead of Java w ith embedded print HTML statements, you have HTML with embedded Java code snippets. We will discuss these in more detail later. In principle, "skins" or multiple w eb page "looks" are possible, but they require strictly separated model and view. JSP encourages entangling model and view , thus, preventing skins. StringTemplate, something I built during years of server development, strictly enforces separation of model and view. You can trivially radically change the look of your site [demo jguru's guest/user/premium look]. Where is the main method in a server? For most deployed applications, there isn't one. The first execution of one of your pages must launch the application initiation procedures. In our case, you will be launching Jetty, the w eb server, from a main method so you could in principle do whatever initialization you wanted before the first page is served. HTTP is stateless. How can your server know w hen the same person comes back to the site? That is,

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w hen I click on a link on a site that takes me to another page on the same site, how does the server know that a particular GET request is from the same person? Further, how does the server track a chunk of data for each person logged into the site? For example, you want to track their name, ID, and pages visited perhaps. Sessions are used for that and w e w ill w orry about them in another lecture. But they exist, and every servlet can ask for a site visitor's session object across pages. These sessions are normally implemented via cookies, little pieces of key/value pair data stored on a person's client machine. Each request to site foo.com sends all foo.com cookies on the client machine to the server along w ith each GET/POST request.

Some details
See package doc: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/2.3/javadoc/index.html Useful class summary: HttpServlet, HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse, HttpSession, Cookie, URLEncoder, java.netURLEncoder.encode(...). Generates HTML that is sent back to the browser. http servlets have methods are associated with the http protocol. GET, POST, etc... The HTTP GET request invokes doGet() method. The servlet life cycle: 1. init 2. service many times (doGet/doPost in our case) 3. destroy One instance of a servlet per server. Watch out for threading issues. Can tell it to be singlethreaded, but very slow. Reference example of using instance vars setting/getting from within service (see section below). Later we'll talk about generating html properly and can discuss in detail. How do they work? Unfortunately that really depends on the servlet container you are using. Some let you place your .java file inside a special directory and your server will be able to send URL requests to that code. The HTTP server compiles the code for you (and can replace an old one on a running server). With Jetty, it w ill find your servlet code from the CLASSPATH so make sure you start your app w ith the path set to see both jetty stuff and your stuff. A servlet runs in the same address space as the server and typically represents a middle tier in a three tier system.

Simple Servlets
GET
Note that the servlet receives a request and response object. The request object contains information about the HTTP request, plus parameters, and other header info. The response object lets you set

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3/3/2011 Java Servlets response headers, cookies, and lets you write to the output stream.
import java.io.*; import javax.servlet.*; import javax.servlet.http.*; public class HelloServlet extends HttpServlet { public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); out.println("<html>"); out.println("<body>"); out.println("<h1>Servlet test</h1>"); out.println("Hello, there!"); out.println("</body>"); out.println("</html>"); } }

POST
Used as target of form processing. Can handle much more data (I think) in terms of parameters. request.getParameter is used to get URL parameters. <html> <body> <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="/servlet/SimpleResponse"> <input type=text size=45 name=query value="type your query here"> <input type=submit value=SEARCH> </FORM> </body> </html> Servlet responding to form (note both doGet and doPost methods): import javax.servlet.*; import javax.servlet.http.*; import java.io.*; public class SimpleResponse extends HttpServlet { public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { response.setContentType("text/html"); PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); out.println("<html><body>"); String user = request.getParameter("user"); String password = request.getParameter("password"); out.println("You type "+user+"/"+password); out.println("</body></html>"); out.close(); } public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { response.setContentType("text/html"); PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); out.println("<html><body>");

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Java Servlets String name = request.getParameter("name"); out.println("Hello "+name+"<br><br>"); out.println("You requested URL: "+ HttpUtils.getRequestURL(request)+request.getQueryString()); out.println("</body></html>"); out.close();
}

} Use HttpUtils.getRequestURL(request) to reconstruct URL minus query (args). Other useful methods in: getRemoteHost() http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/2.3/javadoc/javax/servlet/ServletRequest.html

Argument URL encoding

Jetty and Servlets

Simple file serving

public class MyServer { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { String DOC_ROOT = args[0]; Server server = new Server(); server.addListener(":8080"); server.setRequestLog(getServerLogging()); server.addWebApplication("/", DOC_ROOT); server.start(); } } You will need the follow ing additions to your CLASSPATH: /home/public/cs601/jetty/javax.servlet.jar /home/public/cs601/jetty/org.mortbay.jetty.jar /home/public/cs601/jetty/log4j-1.2.12.jar /home/public/cs601/jetty/jasper-compiler.jar /home/public/cs601/jetty/jasper-runtime.jar /home/public/cs601/jetty/xercesImpl.jar /home/public/cs601/jetty/commons-logging.jar

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w hich are the jars used by Jetty. Start your server like this: java MyServer ~/foo w hich will start serving files underneath ~/foo. URLs like host :8080/t.html w ill get file ~/foo/t.html from the disk. At this point, Jetty will serve files, but you are not recording requests to your server. Add the following method: private static RequestLog getServerLogging() throws Exception { NCSARequestLog a = new NCSARequestLog("./request.log"); a.setRetainDays(90); a.setAppend(true); a.setExtended(false); a.setLogTimeZone("GMT"); a.start(); return a; } And add this line before the server.start(): server.setRequestLog(getServerLogging()); You still get a w arning from Jetty, but ignore it: log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.mortbay.util.Container). log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

Serving Servlets
To get Jetty to handle servlets, update your server code to look like this: Server server = new Server(); server.addListener(":8080"); // logging server.setRequestLog(getServerLogging()); // Servlets ServletHttpContext context = (ServletHttpContext) server.getContext("/"); context.addServlet("Invoker","/servlet/*", "org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.Invoker"); // HTTP server.addWebApplication("/", "./"); server.start(); Servlet HelloServlet w ould be visible at host :8080/servlet/HelloServlet.

Thread safety
The safety issue for servlets with instance variables can be illustrated w ith the follow ing: class PageServlet extends HttpServer { String id; public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException

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{

Java Servlets
id = request.getParameter("ID"); ... out.println("Your id is "+id); } ...

} One thread can set the id then switch to another thread which resets id. When that second thread finishes the first thread w ould start up and proceed to print out the same value as the second thread. I.e., if url s?ID=1 and s?ID=2 result in simultaneous exec of this servlet, you risk seeing the same id value printed out.

JSP
JSP: autogenerated servlets from html + java page. <html> <body> <h1>JSP test</h1> Hello, <%=request.getParameter("name")%>. </body> </html> Don't need a special URL mapping; resin know s how to execute *.jsp files.

File Uploads
Can do file uploads and so on. For example, answer the challenge here: http://www.antlr.org/submit/challenge?type=grammar and see source of resulting page; looks like: <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="/submit/process" ENCTYPE="multipart/form-data"> ... </FORM>

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