Servlets Hits Counter

This example illustrates about counting how many times the servlet is accessed. When first time servlet (CounterServlet) runs then session is created and value of the counter will be zero and after again accessing of servlet the counter value will be increased by one. In this program isNew() method is used whether session is new or old and getValue() method is used to get the value of counter.Following are the steps to be taken to implement a simple page hit counter which is based on Servlet Life Cycle:

Initialize a global variable in init() method.
Increase global variable every time either doGet() or doPost() method is called.
If required, you can use a database table to store the value of global variable in destroy() method. This value can be read inside init() method when servlet would be initialized next time. This step is optional.
If you want to count only unique page hits with-in a session then you can use isNew() method to check if same page already have been hit with-in that session. This step is optional.
You can display value of the global counter to show total number of hits on your web site. This step is also optional.

Popular Tutorials

CounterServlet.java

import java.io.*;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;

public class CounterServlet extends HttpServlet{
  public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, 
  HttpServletResponse response)
  throws ServletException, IOException {
  HttpSession session = request.getSession(true);
  response.setContentType("text/html");
  PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
  Integer count = new Integer(0);
  String head;
  if (session.isNew()) {
  head = "This is the New Session";
  } else {
  head = "This is the old Session";
  Integer oldcount =(Integer)session.getValue("count"); 
  if (oldcount != null) {
  count = new Integer(oldcount.intValue() + 1);
  }
  }
  session.putValue("count", count);
  out.println("<HTML><BODY BGCOLOR="#FDF5E6">n" +
  "<H2 ALIGN="CENTER">" + head + "</H2>n" + 
  "<TABLE BORDER=1 ALIGN=CENTER>n"
  + "<TR BGCOLOR="#FFAD00">n" 
  +"  <TH>Information Type<TH>Session Countn" 
  +"<TR>n" +" <TD>Total Session Accessesn" +
  "<TD>" + count + "n" +
  "</TABLE>n" 
  +"</BODY></HTML>" );
  }
}

Mapping of Servlet (“CounterServlet.java”) in web.xml file

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>CounterServlet</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>CounterServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet> 
<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>CounterServlet</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/CounterServlet</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Running the servlet by this url:
http://localhost:8080/CounterServlet
displays the figure below: