Question

I am new to Servlets. I want to use a method which is called only once after deploying to server. I looked at HttpServlet#init(). But I figured out it is called with each request. Did I misunderstand it? What are the alternatives to init()?

Answer 1

No, it is not called in each request. It is only called during initialization of the servlet which usually happens only once in webapp’s lifetime. Also see this answer for a bit more detail how servlets are created and executed.

If you actually want to do some global/applicationwide initialization (which is thus not per se tied to only the particular servlet), then you would normally use the ServletContextListener for this. You can do the initialization stuff in the contextInitialized() method.

import javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent;
import javax.servlet.ServletContextListener;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebListener;

@WebListener
public class Config implements ServletContextListener {
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
        // Do stuff during webapp's startup.
    }
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {
        // Do stuff during webapp's shutdown.
    }
}

If you’re not on Servlet 3.0 yet and can’t upgrade, and thus can’t use @WebListener annotation, then you need to manually register it in /WEB-INF/web.xml like below:

<listener>
    <listener-class>com.example.Config</listener-class>
</listener>