Servlet Life Cycle

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In this quick article, we will discuss the life cycle of the Servlet with an example. There is a Servlet interface in Servlet API which is the central abstraction of the Java Servlet API. All servlets implement this interface either directly, or more commonly, by extending a class that implements the interface. The Servlet interface provides a life cycle methods to initialize a servlet, to service requests, and to remove a servlet from the server.
These Servlet interface methods are central to the life cycle of a servlet.
  1. init( )
  2. service()
  3. destroy( )
Let us consider a typical user scenario to understand when these methods are called.
  1. First, assume that a user enters a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to a web browser. The browser then generates an HTTP request for this URL. This request is then sent to the appropriate server.
  2. Second, this HTTP request is received by the web server. The server maps this request to a particular servlet. The servlet is dynamically retrieved and loaded into the address space of the server.
  3. Third, the server invokes the init( ) method of the servlet. This method is invoked only when the servlet is first loaded into memory. It is possible to pass initialization parameters to the servlet so it may configure itself.
  4. Fourth, the server invokes the service( ) method of the servlet. This method is called to process the HTTP request. You will see that it is possible for the servlet to read data that has been provided in the HTTP request. It may also formulate an HTTP response for the client.
  5. The servlet remains in the server’s address space and is available to process any other HTTP requests received from clients. The service( ) method is called for each HTTP request.
  6. Finally, The servlet is taken out of service, then destroyed with the destroy() method, then garbage collected and finalized.
Below diagram shows a life cycle methods of Servlet interface:

Servlet Life Cycle Example

In this example, we create ServletImpl which implements Servlet interface and it's all methods. Let's use @WebServlet annotation to define Servlet component so that web.xml is not required.
package net.javaguides.servlet.tutorial;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.PrintWriter;

import javax.servlet.Servlet;
import javax.servlet.ServletConfig;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.ServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.ServletResponse;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet;

@WebServlet("/ServletInterface")
public class ServletImpl implements Servlet {

    private ServletConfig config = null;

    @Override
    public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
        this.config = config;
        System.out.println("iniside init method : " + config.getServletName());

    }

    @Override
    public ServletConfig getServletConfig() {
        return this.config;
    }

    @Override
    public void service(ServletRequest req, ServletResponse res) throws ServletException, IOException {
        System.out.println("inside service method");
        res.setContentType("text/html");

        PrintWriter out = res.getWriter();
        out.print("<html><body>");
        out.print("<b> Servlet Interface Example</b>");
        out.print("</body></html>");
    }

    @Override
    public String getServletInfo() {
        return "Demonstrated implementaton of Servlet interface";
    }

    @Override
    public void destroy() {
        System.out.println("inside destroy method");
    }
}

Output:

Let's deploy above servlet in a web container like tomcat 8 and hit http://localhost:8080/java-servlet-tutorial/ServletInterface link in a browser will result below web page:

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