Lab2 : Servlets - What I learned


  Servlets lab required Eclipse EE environment. Have never used Eclipse EE before, so was a nice
  experience using Eclipse EE. Chapters from O'Rielly notes were very helpful in doing this lab. 
  All the examples like StaticWeb, LifeCycle, Forms, DynamicWeb, and AddressBook were foundation
  for the servlets lab. Using Eclipse EE enterprise edition was great learning experience. 
  All the concepts about how to make servlets, how to start the server, how to add libraries, how
  to add your project to the server were important. 
  
  Another very interesting thing was HTML tags inside java code. Had experience writing HTML tags 
  but was a good experience writing it inside java code. Servlets are mostly request- response
  Communication. That is the user requests the servlet with the help of HTML forms and the Servlet
  gives its response as form. With the help of this lab learned all the important packages and classes
  inside those packages. Example like javax.servlet pacakage, javax.servlet.http. 
  Moreso, it was also helful to learn how to use HttpPreview server inside Eclipse EE. 
  Concept of stop, Publish, and clean while using J2EE Preview server.

  Already learned a lot about databases from course 511. Again using the database in the 
  Servlet lab was helpful. Writing query inside java to access the database for updating, inserting
  and deleting information in the database. After running the Servlet in J2EEPreviewServer provided
  by Eclipse EE, had to run Servlet in tomcat server. Installed tomcat server and tried to run our 
  servlet in tomcat server. In order to run our servlet in tomcat server had to put all the classes 
  webapps folder in home directory of tomcat 6.0. Also for running the servlet we have to provide a 
  WEB.xml file inside the WEB-INF folder. 

  Ran into a problem while associating my project with the server on another machine. It gave me an error
  "The server does not support version 3.0 of the J2EE Web module specification". Could not figure out why I was
  having this problem
  
  Had worked a lot on sessions before with php and asp.net but using java to implement sessions was
  something new and learned a lot from the oreilly notes