Hour 6. Looking Under the Hood—Core Servlet Components

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• The ServletRequest and HttpServletRequest classes

• The ServletResponse and HttpServletResponse classes

• How to use the ServletInputStream and ServletOutputStream classes to perform input and output

• How to use the application-wide classes ServletContext and HttpSession

It may have become pretty apparent that it's tough to separate JavaServer Pages from servlets if you are building Web applications. Although this is true to some degree, later in the book you will learn how to build fairly sophisticated applications without having to know much about servlets. JavaServer Pages 2.0 has made impressive gains in this area by giving the JSP developer some higher-level programming capability and built-in components to work with databases, for example.

Still, if you want to be a programmer extraordinaire, or even if you want to just be effective, knowing more about servlets is essential.