Generating Responses of Different Types

Besides the request object, the container passes an object that implements the HttpServletResponse interface as an argument to the doGet() and doPost() methods. This interface defines methods for getting a writer or stream for the response body. It also defines methods for setting the response status code and headers. Example 4-2 contains the code for a servlet that uses some of these methods.

Example 4-2. Using HttpServletResponse methods
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import javax.servlet.ServletContext;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
  
public class HelloMIME extends HttpServlet {
    private static final int TEXT_TYPE = 0;
    private static final int IMAGE_TYPE = 1;
  
    public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, 
        HttpServletResponse response) 
        throws ServletException, IOException {
  
        String greeting = "Hello World!";
        int majorType = TEXT_TYPE;
        String type = request.getParameter("type");
        if ("plain".equals(type)) {
            response.setContentType("text/plain");
        }
        else if ("html".equals(type)) {
            response.setContentType("text/html");
            greeting = "<html><body><h1>" + greeting +
                "</h1></body></html>";
        }
        else if ("image".equals(type)) {
            response.setContentType("image/gif");
            majorType = IMAGE_TYPE;
        }
        else {
            response.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_BAD_REQUEST, 
                   "Please specify a valid ...

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