Question

I have a doubt regarding the use of servlets.

In the application I’m building I use Html pages to ask the user for info.

Imagine a Html page that lets the user request to see on the screen the content of a data base. What I’m doing is:

1.- From the Html page I’m calling a servlet that will open a connection with the database.
2.- The servlet builds the web page that the user will see.

My question is: is there any other way of doing this? Do I have to build the web page in the servlet or is there any way of sending the information contained in the database to an .html file which will build the web page (in my case I need to show on the screen a table containing all the information) ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Ultimately the browser has to send a request to the server for the database info. You can do this in many ways:

1. build the whole page in the servlet (perhaps the simplest)
2. build a page in the servlet containing (say) XML data, and the browser renders it into HTML (via XSL/Javascript etc.). That may be suitable if you want the browser to control the formatting and presentation.
3. build a page containing AJAX requests to go back to the server and get the data. That may be more suitable for data that updates regularly, or more interactive applications.

There are numerous ways to skin this cat. I suspect you’re doing the simplest one, which is fine. I would tend towards this without explicit requirements that mean I need to do something else. Further requirements that complicate matters may include paging the data if there’s too much to fit on the screen. All the solutions above can be made to incorporate this in some fashion.