Listeners Vs Filters

[Sandeep Vaid]

It says that we can use filters to track the user request but all these we can do by listeners also so why filters ?

[Ulf Dittmer]

What kind of listener would you use that gets activated by an incoming request?

[Sergio Tridente]

You may use ServletRequestListener.

[Marc Peabody]

With filters you can use the Chain of Responsibility pattern whereas I do not think this could be accomplished with the listener.

The filters' implementation of Chain of Responsibility allows you to wrap the request or response using the Decorator pattern. This is something else that the listener does not allow you to do.

Oh, and I think the listener can only be run when a request is created or destroyed. This means it can not be configured to run during a forwarding of a request - but as I recall it is possible to configure listeners to run on any of the different kinds of dispatching on a request.