Standing on the Shoulders of Servlets - The Web of Java

This session will attempt to shortly tell one, holistic and a self-contained story of Java’s core web infrastructure, its Java/Jakarta EE world and a central component called Servlet - things that underpin an almost entire Java web ecosystem, something that is often not known to many Java developers, but something that is the core foundation of many Java web technologies, including Spring web frameworks and other systems or libraries. We will also talk about servlet and its container architecture, how servlets work, how they are implemented, maintained, and supported under the hood, and how this all lays the foundation for the web in Java. We will also see how servlets underpin the Spring framework’s web module. This is the fundamentals of Java web, which many engineers do not care/know about, but which is very important and interesting.