Dinesh on Java

The life cycle of a servlet is controlled by the container in which the servlet has been deployed. When a request is mapped to a servlet, the container performs the following steps.

If an instance of the servlet does not exist, the Web container

1. Loads the servlet class.
2. Creates an instance of the servlet class.
3. Initializes the servlet instance by calling the init method init () .
4. Invokes the service method service(), passing a request and response object.
5. The servlet is terminated by calling the destroy() method.
6. Finally, servlet is garbage collected by the garbage collector of the JVM.

 

As displayed in the above diagram, there are three states of a servlet: new, ready and end. The servlet is in new state if servlet instance is created. After invoking the init() method, Servlet comes in the ready state. In the ready state, servlet performs all the tasks. When the web container invokes the destroy() method, it shifts to the end state.

1) Servlet class is loaded

The classloader is responsible to load the servlet class. The servlet class is loaded when the first request for the servlet is received by the web container.

2) Servlet instance is created

The web container creates the instance of a servlet after loading the servlet class. The servlet instance is created only once in the servlet life cycle.

3) init method is invoked

The web container calls the init method only once after creating the servlet instance. The init method is used to initialize the servlet. It is the life cycle method of the javax.servlet.Servlet interface. Syntax of the init method is given below:

public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException  

4) service method is invoked

The web container calls the service method each time when request for the servlet is received. If servlet is not initialized, it follows the first three steps as described above then calls the service method. If servlet is initialized, it calls the service method. Notice that servlet is initialized only once. The syntax of the service method of the Servlet interface is given below:

public void service(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response)   
  throws ServletException, IOException  

The service () method is called by the container and service method invokes doGe, doPost, doPut, doDelete, etc. methods as appropriate. So you have nothing to do with service() method but you override either doGet() or doPost() depending on what type of request you receive from the client.

The doGet() and doPost() are most frequently used methods with in each service request. Here is the signature of these two methods.

A. The doGet() Method

A GET request results from a normal request for a URL or from an HTML form that has no METHOD specified and it should be handled by doGet() method.

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request,
                  HttpServletResponse response)
    throws ServletException, IOException {
    // Servlet code
}

B. The doPost() Method

A POST request results from an HTML form that specifically lists POST as the METHOD and it should be handled by doPost() method.

public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request,
                   HttpServletResponse response)
    throws ServletException, IOException {
    // Servlet code
}

5) destroy method is invoked

The web container calls the destroy method before removing the servlet instance from the service. It gives the servlet an opportunity to clean up any resource for example memory, thread etc. The syntax of the destroy method of the Servlet interface is given below:

public void destroy()

Architecture Diagram:

The following figure depicts a typical servlet life-cycle scenario.

• First the HTTP requests coming to the server are delegated to the servlet container.
• The servlet container loads the servlet before invoking the service() method.
• Then the servlet container handles multiple requests by spawning multiple threads, each thread executing the service() method of a single instance of the servlet.