ContentsQuick Start"Hello World!" - as a web page

Previous: Getting the environment set up | Next: "Hello World!" - as a PDF document

The first thing most of us like to do when learning a new programming tool or environment is to write that most-commonly reinvented wheel: "Hello World"

This what JBuilder3's servlet wizard gave me -> See the source 1

I removed lines 17 - 23 and inserted new stuff -> See the source2

To clarify things, here it is without the fluff that JBuilder3 put in (we'll use this version to comment on the what's been done) -> See the source 3

When you compile this third iteration, you should be able to look at it with your browser, and it should look like -> this

Now, here's what we've done (referring to source 3):

• Removed the "standard servlet" API calls and HTML printing from the body of the doGet() - as of today, most servlet texts make the pessimistic assumption that you WANT to embed HTML in your source.
• Line 13 - constructed an HtmlPage object using the response object that was passed to doGet().
• Line 14 - constructed and initialized a string to hold the title, because we use it twice.
• Line 15 - set the title of the page (this is the title that is displayed at the top of the browser window and will be used if the page URL is saved as a favorite / bookmark).
• Line 16 - begins the body of the document, which is what gets shown in the main window of the browser.
• Line 17 - starts a mode where anything that goes onto the page will be centered.
• Line 18 - outputs the title string in a standard heading style. Heading styles range from 1 to 6, where 1 is most noticeable and 6 is least noticeable.
• Line 19 - draws a line separator on the page.
• Line 20 - prints the current time in date on the page.
• Line 21 - turn off centering.
• Line 22 - closes the page.

As you can see, one of the uses of the servlet utilities is to encapsulate HTML, so that you can think in Java instead of jumping back and forth between the two languages. While this may seem interesting and useful for small applications, I urge you to check out Enhydra XMLC for a much better approach.

ContentsQuick Start"Hello World!" - as a web page

Previous: Getting the environment set up | Next: "Hello World!" - as a PDF document