Servlet communication between web-apps

Question

using the ServletContext to enable communication between Servlets within the same Application is quite nice and I wonder if there's a comparable way to enable communication between servlets from different apps (which are deployed on the same Servlet-Container?

The background is that I've two applications which could be distributed to multiple servers. In that case they're supposed to communicate via SOAP - but in case they're both hosted in the same server (and Servlet-Container) I'd like to avoid the SOAP overhead and have direct communication.

Any suggestions?

Cheers

Answer 1

I am not sure about different servlet container. But it works for same container by using getServletContext().getContext() method.

First you need to make changes in below file

(Windows) C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\conf\context.xml Set value of crossContext to true.

context.xml

<Context crossContext="true">

    <!-- Default set of monitored resources -->
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>

    <!-- Uncomment this to disable session persistence across Tomcat restarts -->
    <!--
    <Manager pathname="" />
    -->

    <!-- Uncomment this to enable Comet connection tacking (provides events
         on session expiration as well as webapp lifecycle) -->
    <!--
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.CometConnectionManagerValve" />
    -->

</Context>

Please note that crossContext="true".

Suppose you have two web applications with name InterServletComm1 and InterServletComm2 having servlets Servlet1 and Servlet1 in each web application respectively. Then the code in each servlets goes as follows:

Servlet1.java

package interServletComm1;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

import javax.servlet.RequestDispatcher;
import javax.servlet.ServletContext;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

/**
 * Servlet implementation class Servlet1
 */
@WebServlet("/Servlet1")
public class Servlet1 extends HttpServlet {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    /**
     * @see HttpServlet#HttpServlet()
     */
    public Servlet1() {
        super();
        // TODO Auto-generated constructor stub
    }

    /**
     * @see HttpServlet#doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
     */
    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException 
    {
        response.setContentType("text/html");
        PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter();

        request.setAttribute("name", "WebApp1");
        ServletContext context = getServletContext().getContext("/InterServletComm2");
        RequestDispatcher rd = context.getRequestDispatcher("/Servlet2");
        rd.forward(request, response);
    }

    /**
     * @see HttpServlet#doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
     */
    protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    }

}

Servlet2.java

package interServletComm2;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

import javax.servlet.RequestDispatcher;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

/**
 * Servlet implementation class Servlet2
 */
@WebServlet("/Servlet2")
public class Servlet2 extends HttpServlet {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    /**
     * @see HttpServlet#HttpServlet()
     */
    public Servlet2() {
        super();
        // TODO Auto-generated constructor stub
    }

    /**
     * @see HttpServlet#doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
     */
    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException 
    {
        response.setContentType("text/html");
        PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter();
        String name = (String) request.getAttribute("name");
        pw.println("This is web application 2.");
        pw.println("<br>The value received from web application one is: " + name);
    }

    /**
     * @see HttpServlet#doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
     */
    protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    }

}

Above code sends attribute name from InterServletComm1 and it is received in InterServletComm2. Please let me know if this answer is not clear.

Answer 2

Such API existed in the first version of Servlet API. You could find other servlets from servlet context and call them. I doubt you could call servlets from other web applications.

Anyway this API was deprecated and is not supported more. The reason is that EJBs were introduced. Servlets play role of a web front-end only. They should not implement business logic and therefore should not communicate with each other.

The modern way to perform communication among different application is either using web services or EJB or if you are using Spring - their remote mechanisms or messaging.