Server-Side Java with Jakarta-Tomcat

Now that we have seen how a servlet can be used to enter information into our web log, we will write another servlet to display the latest contents. This servlet will be relatively simple; it will take no parameters and will display the latest contents of the web log (see Listing 4 at ftp://ftp.linuxjournal.com/pub/lj/listings/issue84/).

Our ShowBlog servlet will only have two methods, init (which is identical to the “init” method from AddBlogEntry) and doGet. doGet will retrieve all of the entries in a web log, from the newest to the oldest. It displays each entry as a three-column row in an HTML table, showing the date and time at which it was added, the headline and the text associated with that headline.

Of course, a real web log will do things in a slightly more intelligent way, limiting the number of remarks and arranging them with a better sense of design. But that's easy enough to do once we have retrieved the information from the database in the correct order.

We create our query (inside of a “synchronized” block) and wrap it into a Statement. Notice how we need not use a PreparedStatement because we are not planning to instantiate any variable values into the statement.

We retrieve the results from the query into a ResultSet:

ResultSet rs = statement.executeQuery(query);

A ResultSet allows us to pull results out of the database one row at a time. We can iterate through each row inside of a while loop using the rs.next( ) method. Within each iteration, we can retrieve a column as a String value using the rs.getString( ) method, passing the name of the column as a parameter.

After compiling this servlet and placing it on my system, I was able to add some new web log entries and display them within a matter of minutes.

Servlets are the Java world's equivalent to the Perl world's modules for mod_perl. In many ways, they are actually better as they provide a great deal of power without endangering the web server with potentially risky programs. This month, we saw some simple ways to build web applications using servlets and open-source tools that we can download from the Web. Next month, we will continue our exploration of server-side Java by looking at some simple uses for Java Server Pages, also known as JSPs.

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