Question

I was wandering if there is an easy way to access a servlet which contains logic to jumble a word. I have the logic to jumble a word and would like to put this within a servlet.

I already have Tomcat set up on eclipse.

Within the android application will be an Onclick method and when clicked will jumble the word through the servlet. I have looked at HttpConnection but not sure how to implement this easily.

Any ideas on how to do this.

Thanks

Answer 1

Servlets are able to execute some Java code based on a specific HTTP request URL. You just need to map the servlet class in webapplication’s web.xml file on a certain <url-pattern> (or when you’re already running a Servlet 3.0 capable container, using the @WebServlet annotation). A kickoff example can be found in the servlets info page.

Assuming that the servlet runs at http://example.com/context/yourservlet and returns the String result as plaintext like follows:

// ...
response.setContentType("text/plain");
response.setContentEncoding("UTF-8");
response.getWriter().write(word);

All you need to do is to execute the HTTP request and obtain the HTTP response programmatically. Here’s a basic kickoff example using Android’s builtin HttpClient API (all obvious exception and resource handling aside):

String url = "http://example.com/context/yourservlet";
InputStream input = new DefaultHttpClient().execute(new HttpGet(url)).getEntity().getContent();
String word = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(input, "UTF-8")).readLine();
// ...