Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition

Everybody wants a web site

You have a killer idea for a web site. To destroy the competition, you need a flexible, scalable architecture. You need servlets and JSPs.

Before we start building, let’s take a look at the World Wide Web from about 40k feet. What we care most about in this chapter are how web clients and web servers talk to one another.

These next several pages are probably all review for you, especially if you’re already a web application developer, but it’ll give us a chance to expose some of the terminology we use throughout the book.

Note

The web consists of gazillions of clients (using browsers like Mozilla or Safari) and servers (using web server apps like Apache) connected through wires and wireless networks. Our goal is to build a web application that clients around the globe can access. And to become obscenely rich.