Why You Should 

Not Override service

You can add support for other types of 

requests by adding doPut, doTrace, etc.

You can add support for modification dates

Add a getLastModified method

The service method gives you automatic 

support for: 

HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE requests

Alternative: have doPost call doGet

public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request,

HttpServletResponse response)   {

doGet(request, response);

}

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Servlets

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Initializing Servlets

Common in real life servlets

E.g., initializing database connection pools.

Use ServletConfig.getInitParameter to read 

initialization parameters

Call getServletConfig to obtain the ServletConfig object 

Set init parameters in web.xml (ver 2.2/2.3)

 /WEB INF/web.xml

Many servers have custom interfaces to create web.xml

It is common to use init even when 

you don't read init parameters

E.g., to set up data structures that don't change during the 

life of the servlet, to load information from disk, etc.

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