PreInitialization of servlets

[Vishal Dhingreja]

Hi All

what do you mean preinitialization of servlets ? What is it used for & how can it be acheived

Regrds
Vishal

[William Brogden]

READ THE JAVADOCS and the servlet API
The init method will be called by the servlet container before any request is processed.
Download the servlet API and keep it handy - here is a good place to start.
Bill

[Vishal Dhingreja]

Hi William

Sorry If that question sounded lowsy. Though I don't boast of great exposure in coding with Servlets API ,I very well understand the meaning of
Initialisation of servlets & quiet conversant with the servlet lifecycle.

What i wanted to ask was if there is something before initilisation.

If PRE-Initilisation * Initilisation mean the same then sorry for creating this thread

Bye
Vishal

[William Brogden]

Well, approaching it from the point of view of "what happens before a servlet gets initialized" - you can get some idea by watching Tomcat startup message in a command prompt. Roughly speaking,
1 - the server.xml is read and the basic connectors, loggers, filters, etc are configured.
2 - the default web.xml is read and servlets defined there with load-on-startup numbers are instantiated and init()ed.
3 - Tomcat goes through all the "web applications" that it knows about, reading the web.xml for each one - here is where servlet initialization parameters for your application servlets are picked up. Any servlets defined with load-on-startup get init()ed

A failure at any point in the above could prevent your application servlet from ever getting initialized, so I guess we could call that pre-initialization.
Bill