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  • May 03, 2018
  • Post Nº 54

Servlet and Filter

Today, I’d like to talk about the famous HttpServlet and Filter, inTomcat 8.5 server.

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Today, I’d like to talk about the famous HttpServlet and Filter, in Tomcat 8.5 server.

HTTP Servlet

A servlet is a small Java program that runs within a Web server. Servlets receive and respond to requests from Web clients, usually across HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol. To implement this interface, you can write a generic servlet that extends javax.servlet.GenericServlet or an HTTP servlet that extends javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.

In my case, I created a servlet called MyServlet by extending HTTP servlet. And register it using annotation @WebServlet:

@WebServlet("/")
public class MyServlet extends HttpServlet {
  ...
}

If you want your servlet handle a particular HTTP method, you can override the protected method defined by HTTP servlet. For example, override the GET method:

@WebServlet("/")
public class MyServlet extends HttpServlet {

  @Override
  protected doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {
    ...
  }
}

By overriding the target method, you can access to information of HTTP request and response, also modify them—such as providing a HTTP status code for the response, or write content to the response.

Servlet Filter

A filter is an object that performs filtering tasks on either the request to a resource (a servlet or static content), or on the response from a resource, or both. Filters perform filtering in the doFilter method. Every Filter has access to a FilterConfig object from which it can obtain its initialization parameters, and a reference to the ServletContext which it can use, for example, to load resources needed for filtering tasks.

A simple implementation of MyFilter can be written as follows:

package io.mincong.tomcat;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebFilter;

@WebFilter("/")
public class MyFilter implements Filter {

  private static final Logger LOGGER = Logger.getLogger(MyFilter.class.getName());

  @Override
  public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) {
    LOGGER.info("Initialized.");
  }

  @Override
  public void doFilter(
      ServletRequest request,
      ServletResponse response,
      FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
    LOGGER.info("Before...");
    chain.doFilter(request, response);
    LOGGER.info("After...");
  }

  @Override
  public void destroy() {
    LOGGER.info("Destroyed.");
  }
}

As stated before, filters perform filtering in the doFilter method. Here, MyFilter is implementation of the chain of responsibility pattern. The point is that each filter stays “in front” and “behind” each servlet it is mapped to. So if you have a filter around a servlet, you’ll have:

public void doFilter(...) {
  // before
  chain.doFilter(request, response);
  // after
}

Demo

If I deploy both classes into a Tomcat server, I’ll obtain something like:

[INFO] May 03, 2018 9:25:00 PM io.mincong.tomcat.MyFilter doFilter
[INFO] INFO: Before...
[INFO] May 03, 2018 9:25:00 PM io.mincong.tomcat.MyServlet doGet
[INFO] INFO: http://localhost:8080/filter/
[INFO] May 03, 2018 9:25:00 PM io.mincong.tomcat.MyFilter doFilter
[INFO] INFO: After...

It proves that the chaining responsability is respected. The chain is:

  1. MyFilter init()
  2. MyFilter doFilter()
  3. MyServlet doGet()
  4. MyFilter doFilter()
  5. MyFilter destroy()

If you want to try it yourself, you can do the following using 2 terminals. One terminal for the server side:

$ git clone git@github.com:mincong-h/tomcat-demo.git
$ mvn clean install
$ cd filter
$ mvn cargo:run

Another terminal for the client side:

$ curl -s http://localhost:8080/filter/ | jq
{
  "status": 200
}

And then, observe the log output of terminal 1 (server) to understand the filter and servlet logic.

References

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