Commons-like HTTP server-side utilities?

Question

I'm a big fan of the Apache commons libraries, since they tend to cover a lot of utilities I would normally have to write myself. Recently I've started working on a server-side project and I'm finding a lot of cases where the default classes are missing obvious functionality:

HttpServletRequest

• Needs a Cookie getCookie(String name) method.
• Needs an easy way to get request URL info (besides calling getContextURL() and parsing it yourself)
• Something to simplify basic and digest authentication would be nice

I suspect I'll find more of these as I work on this project.

These seem like the sorts of things that are bound to be in a library somewhere. Does such a library exist?

Answer 1

People rarely write web apps on bare Servlets nowadays. There are some great web frameworks around that make a lot of things a lot easier, including the things you mention in your question.

I would recommend you have a look at Spring MVC.