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Asked: 2026-05-19T12:14:36+00:00

I am looking at such previous questions as: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/98334/creating-a-java-servlet-web-application How many actions should a

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I am looking at such previous questions as:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/98334/creating-a-java-servlet-web-application
How many actions should a servlet perform?

There are answers in these threads that contradict each other; some people say use a servlet for each page, and other say use only ONE servlet for your entire app.

I have the same problem. So, how to I decide what my servlets will be? If I use a single (or a few) “Front Controllers,” how do I parse the requests to delegate them to other objects? For example, if a single page has 3 different forms on it, how do I tell the difference between their requests? How do I tell the difference between forms and requests from different pages? Assign multiple servlet-mappings for each form + page? Look at the parameter names? URL-encode a “request-type” parameter?

So many ways to do things…

P.S. I’d rather NOT use a framework like Struts – I want to know the best way to do this using the Servlet API. I’m using Tomcat7.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Front controller is just the gateway into your app for HTTP requests. But that usually acts as a traffic cop to route HTTP requests to classes that know how to handle them.

    Spring, for example, has a DispatcherServlet that maps Controllers to requests (usually by URL). The Controller used to be an interface, but now Controller POJOs can also be annotated.

    The Controller interface has a single method: handleRequest:

    ModelAndView    handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)

    It takes in HTTP request and response and returns a ModelAndView.

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