Power Servlets can harness the full power of the core Java APIs: networking and URL access, multithreading, image manipulation, data compression, database connectivity, internationalization, remote method invocation (RMI), CORBA connectivity, and object serialization, among others. If you want to write a web application that allows employees to query a corporate legacy database, you can take advantage of all of the Java Enterprise APIs in doing so. Or, if you need to create a web-based directory lookup application, you can make use of the JNDI API. As a servlet author, you can also pick and choose from a plethora of third-party Java classes and JavaBeans components. In the future, you’ll even be able to use newly introduced Enterprise JavaBeans components. Today, servlets can use thirdparty code to handle tasks such as regular expression searching, data charting, advanced database access, and advanced networking. Servlets are also well suited for enabling client/server communication. With a Javabased applet and a Java- based servlet, you can use RMI and object serialization to handle client/server communication, which means that you can leverage the same custom code on the client as on the server. Using CGI for the same purpose is much more complicated, as you have to develop your own custom protocol to handle the communication. Efficiency and Endurance Servlet invocation is highly efficient. Once a servlet is loaded, it generally remains in the server’s memory as a single object instance. Thereafter, the server invokes the servlet to handle a request using a simple, lightweight method invocation. Unlike with CGI, there’s no process to spawn or interpreter to invoke, so the servlet can begin handling the request almost immediately. Multiple, concurrent requests are handled by separate threads, so servlets are highly scalable Servlets, in general, are naturally enduring objects. Because a servlet stays in the server’s memory as a single object instance, it automatically maintains its state and can hold on to external resources, such as database connections, that may otherwise take several seconds to establish. Safety Servlets support safe programming practices on a number of levels. Because they are written in Java, servlets inherit the strong type safety of the Java language. In addition, the Servlet API is implemented to be type-safe. While most values in a CGI program, including a numeric item like a server port number, are treated as strings, values are manipulated by the Servlet API using their native types, so a server port number is represented as an integer. Java’s automatic garbage collection and lack of pointers mean that servlets are generally safe from memory management problems like dangling pointers, invalid pointer references, and memory leaks. Servlets can handle errors safely, due to Java’s exception-handling mechanism. If a servlet divides by zero or performs some other illegal operation, it throws an exception that can be safely caught and handled by the server, which can politely log the error and apologize to the user. If a C++-based server extension were to make the same mistake, it could potentially crash the server. A server can further protect itself from servlets through the use of a Java security manager. A server can execute its servlets under the watch of a strict security manager that, for example, enforces a security policy designed to prevent a malicious or poorly written servlet from damaging the server file system. Elegance
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