Category: Servlet

In the past whenever you wrote a Servlet you had a lot of work to do. First you wrote your servlet, then you had to add configuration for that servlet into web.xml so that your application would use it.

For simple applications this was fine but the more servlets you wrote the harder it became as web.xml started to become large and unwieldy.

Now with J2EE 6 you got the ability to add annotations to your servlets. No more do you need to add anything to web.xml as the container scans the classpath for any servlet that’s annotated with @WebServlet getting the required configuration from there.

This also has the benefit that you can write libraries of servlets. Those servlets get deployed automatically and you don’t have to worry about duplicating the config.

Both Tomcat 7 and TomEE 1.5.1 support the J2EE 6 Web Profile as standard. I’m not certain of other containers as I’ve only tested this on those two.

Continue reading “Writing Servlets the J2EE 6 / Servlet 3.0 way”