Explicitly instance of Servlet

[Rahul Juneja]

Can anybody tell me whether we can Explicitly create the instance of a Servlet.I mean
1)'Not by Calling Servlet first time or
2) Load on Startup'.

Does anybody know can we create an instance of Servlet without these options.

This question was asked to me in an interview.

Thanks,
Rahul
[ June 11, 2004: Message edited by: Rahul Juneja ]

[Ivor Lithan]

Not quite sure what you mean, but if you mean what I think you do, you could do :

 Servlet sE = (Servlet) Class.forName(url).newInstance(); 

or am I missing what you are asking?

[Rahul Juneja]

Thanks Dear,

I was asking the same but one more Question which comes in my mind is that what is the practical implementation of this.

Can you please give me some idea about that.

thanks,
Rahul Juneja

[Frank Carver]

Well, a servlet is just a Java class that happens to implement a particular interface. There's nothing to stop you (other than the potential for confusing a reader, and other issues of general good design) from giving it a "main" method, and/or a constructor, and creating an instance of it in the way you would any other Java object.

Of course, if you create an instance of a servlet class yourself, there will be no container that knows about it, so it will never receive HTTP requests, but I gues that's not what you want, is it?

[Ivor Lithan]

Dear???

Well, the one time I used that was when I had a servlet that implemented runnable, with the idea being I could have a thread running and then query it through the web front end - and this servlet was kicked off by a scheduler that I had written - and so it used that bit of code to start it all off - other than that I've never used it for anything