Servlet App Event Listeners

Sun Microsystems released the proposed final draft of the Servlet 2.3 specification on October 20, 2000. Although the Servlet 2.3 specification is not in its final version yet, we do not have to wait any longer to play with the exciting new features defined by it. Apache's Tomcat has released a build, version 4.0 beta 1 that fully supports the Servlet 2.3 proposed final draft specification.

My last article was an introduction to Servlet concepts (for those new to this area) and then it was an overview of two new additions to the specification, the application lifecycle events and Servlet filters. This article is going to go into detail about writing the application lifecycle events.

Working Environment

All the code that will be shown in this article has been tested on Apache's Tomcat version 4.0 beta 1 on a Windows platform. This version of Tomcat has full support of the new Servlet 2.3 specification and the JSP 1.2 specification. If you need help installing and setting up Tomcat refer to James Goodwill's article Installing and Configuring Tomcat for an easy to follow guide on installing and configuring Apache's Tomcat version 4.0 beta 1.

All the code is part of a Web Application called demo.

Overview of Application Lifecycle Events

The Servlet 2.3 proposed final draft specification has defined application lifecycle events to provide Web Application developers more interaction with the ServletContext object and HttpSession objects. Web Application developers write event listeners so they can now be notified when lifecycle events happen (such as creation or destruction) or when attributes are modified in the ServletContext object or HttpSession objects.

Event listeners are Java classes that follow the JavaBeans design and are provided by the Web Application developer in the Web archive (.war) file. There are two types of event listeners, and both types apply to the ServletContext object and HttpSession objects. The two types are lifecycle events and changes to attributes events. Table 1 shows the types of events, a brief description, and the listener interface to implement. This table is taken from the Servlet 2.3 proposed final draft specification.

An interesting point is that there can be multiple listener classes listening to each event type and the Web application developer has the flexibility to define the order the event listener objects are invoked.

The container manages the lifecycle of event listeners. It is the containers responsibility to instantiate each of the listener classes in a Web Application before the execution of the first request into the Web Application. Also, each of the listener classes must be referenced until the Web Application services the last request.

For more details on the container's responsibilities, refer to my last article.