Editing Java (programming language) (section)

=== Servlet ===
{{Main|Java servlet}}
[[Java servlet]] technology provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems. Servlets are [[server-side]] Java EE components that generate responses to requests from [[client (computing)|clients]]. Most of the time, this means generating [[HTML]] pages in response to [[Hypertext Transfer Protocol|HTTP]] requests, although there are a number of other standard servlet classes available, for example for [[WebSocket]] communication.

The Java servlet API has to some extent been superseded (but still used under the hood) by two standard Java technologies for web services:
* the [[Java API for RESTful Web Services]] (JAX-RS 2.0) useful for AJAX, JSON and REST services, and
* the [[Java API for XML Web Services]] (JAX-WS) useful for [[SOAP]] [[Web Service]]s.

Typical implementations of these APIs on Application Servers or Servlet Containers use a standard servlet for handling all interactions with the [[HTTP]] requests and responses that delegate to the web service methods for the actual business logic.