J2EE Architecture

- The client/server application architecture.

- Which was a two-tier architecture.

- Evolved over time to a multitier architecture.

- This natural progression occurred as additional tiers were introduced between the end-
user clients and back-end systems.

- Although a multitier architecture brings greater flexibility of design.

- It also increases the

o complexity of building,

o testing, deploying,

o administering, and

 maintaining application components.

What are Servlets?

Java Servlets are programs that run on a Web or Application server and act as a middle layer
between a requests coming from a Web browser or other HTTP client and databases or
applications on the HTTP server.
Using Servlets, you can collect input from users through web page forms, present records from
a database or another source, and create web pages dynamically.
Java Servlets often serve the same purpose as programs implemented using the Common
Gateway Interface (CGI). But Servlets offer several advantages in comparison with the CGI.
 Performance is significantly better.
 Servlets execute within the address space of a Web server. It is not necessary to create a
separate process to handle each client request.
 Servlets are platform-independent because they are written in Java.
 Java security manager on the server enforces a set of restrictions to protect the resources
on a server machine. So servlets are trusted.
 The full functionality of the Java class libraries is available to a servlet. It can
communicate with applets, databases, or other software via the sockets and RMI
mechanisms that you have seen already.

Servlets Architecture
The following diagram shows the position of Servlets in a Web Application.

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Servlets Tasks
Servlets perform the following major tasks −
 Read the explicit data sent by the clients (browsers). This includes an HTML form on a
Web page or it could also come from an applet or a custom HTTP client program.
 Read the implicit HTTP request data sent by the clients (browsers). This includes
cookies, media types and compression schemes the browser understands, and so forth.
 Process the data and generate the results. This process may require talking to a database,
executing an RMI or CORBA call, invoking a Web service, or computing the response
directly.
 Send the explicit data (i.e., the document) to the clients (browsers). This document can
be sent in a variety of formats, including text (HTML or XML), binary (GIF images),
Excel, etc.
 Send the implicit HTTP response to the clients (browsers). This includes telling the
browsers or other clients what type of document is being returned (e.g., HTML), setting
cookies and caching parameters, and other such tasks.

Servlets Packages
Java Servlets are Java classes run by a web server that has an interpreter that supports the Java
Servlet specification.
Servlets can be created using the javax.servlet and javax.servlet.httppackages, which are a
standard part of the Java's enterprise edition, an expanded version of the Java class library that
supports large-scale development projects.
These classes implement the Java Servlet and JSP specifications. At the time of writing this
tutorial, the versions are Java Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1.
Java servlets have been created and compiled just like any other Java class. After you install the
servlet packages and add them to your computer's Classpath, you can compile servlets with the
JDK's Java compiler or any other current compiler.
JDBC stands for Java Database Connectivity, which is a standard Java API for database-
independent connectivity between the Java programming language and a wide range of
databases.
The JDBC library includes APIs for each of the tasks mentioned below that are commonly
associated with database usage.

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  Making a connection to a database.
 Creating SQL or MySQL statements.
 Executing SQL or MySQL queries in the database.
 Viewing & Modifying the resulting records.
Fundamentally, JDBC is a specification that provides a complete set of interfaces that allows for
portable access to an underlying database. Java can be used to write different types of
executables, such as −
 Java Applications
 Java Applets
 Java Servlets
 Java ServerPages (JSPs)
 Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs).
Steps to create a servlet example
1. Steps to create the servlet using Tomcat server
1. Create a directory structure
2. Create a Servlet
3. Compile the Servlet
4. Create a deployment descriptor
5. Start the server and deploy the application

There are given 6 steps to create a servlet example. These steps are required for all the servers.

The servlet example can be created by three ways:

1. By implementing Servlet interface,

2. By inheriting GenericServlet class, (or)
3. By inheriting HttpServlet class

The mostly used approach is by extending HttpServlet because it provides http request specific
method such as doGet(), doPost(), doHead() etc.

Here, we are going to use apache tomcat server in this example. The steps are as follows:

1. Create a directory structure

2. Create a Servlet
3. Compile the Servlet
4. Create a deployment descriptor
5. Start the server and deploy the project
6. Access the servlet

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 Example to connect to the mysql database in java

For connecting java application with the mysql database, you need to follow 5 steps to perform
database connectivity.

In this example we are using MySql as the database. So we need to know following informations
for the mysql database:

1. Driver class: The driver class for the mysql database is com.mysql.jdbc.Driver.
2. Connection URL: The connection URL for the mysql database
is jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/sonoo where jdbc is the API, mysql is the database,
localhost is the server name on which mysql is running, we may also use IP address, 3306
is the port number and sonoo is the database name. We may use any database, in such
case, you need to replace the sonoo with your database name.
3. Username: The default username for the mysql database is root.
4. Password: Password is given by the user at the time of installing the mysql database. In
this example, we are going to use root as the password.

Example to Connect Java Application with mysql database

In this example, sonoo is the database name, root is the username and password.

1. import java.sql.*;
2. class MysqlCon{
3. public static void main(String args[]){
4. try{
5. Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
6. Connection con=DriverManager.getConnection(
7. "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/sonoo","root","root");
8. //here sonoo is database name, root is username and password
9. Statement stmt=con.createStatement();
10. ResultSet rs=stmt.executeQuery("select * from emp");
11. while(rs.next())
12. System.out.println(rs.getInt(1)+" "+rs.getString(2)+" "+rs.getString(3));
13. con.close();
14. }catch(Exception e){ System.out.println(e);}
15. }
16. }

Two ways to load the jar file:

1. paste the mysqlconnector.jar file in jre/lib/ext folder
2. set classpath

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 1) paste the mysqlconnector.jar file in JRE/lib/ext folder:
Download the mysqlconnector.jar file. Go to jre/lib/ext folder and paste the jar file here.

2) set classpath:
There are two ways to set the classpath:

o temporary
o permanent

How to set the temporary classpath

open command prompt and write:

1. C:>set classpath=c:\folder\mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar;.;

How to set the permanent classpath

Go to environment variable then click on new tab. In variable name write classpath and in
variable value paste the path to the mysqlconnector.jar file by appending mysqlconnector.jar;.; as
C:\folder\mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar;.;

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