【正文】 is is in contrast to many of the other CGI alternatives, which require a significant initial investment for the purchase of a proprietary package. Price and portability are somewhat connected. For example, Marty tries to keep track of the countries of readers that send him questions by . India was near the top of the list, probably 2 behind the . Marty also taught one of his JSP and servlet training courses (see in Manila, and there was great interest in servlet and JSP technology there. Now, why are India and the Philippines both so interested? We surmise that the answer is twofold. First, both countries have large pools of welleducated software developers. Second, both countries have (or had, at that time) highly unfavorable currency exchange rates against the . dollar. So, buying a specialpurpose Web server from a . pany consumed a large part of early project funds. But, with servlets and JSP, they could start with a free server: Apache Tomcat (either standalone, embedded in the regular Apache Web server, or embedded in Microsoft IIS). Once the project starts to bee successful, they could move to a server like Caucho Resin that had higher performance and easier administration but that is not free. But none of their servlets or JSP pages have to be rewritten. If their project bees even larger, they might want to move to a distributed (clustered) environment. No problem: they could move to Macromedia JRun Professional, which supports distributed applications (Web farms). Again, none of their servlets or JSP pages have to be rewritten. If the project bees quite large and plex, they might Servlet 和 Jsp 技術(shù)概要 軟件工程 081 婁文 520813130116 8 want to use Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) to encapsulate their business logic. So, they might switch to BEA WebLogic or Oracle9i AS. Again, none of their servlets or JSP pages have to be rewritten. Finally, if their project bees even bigger, they might move it off of their Linux box and onto an IBM mainframe running IBM WebSphere. But once again, none of their servlets or JSP pages have to be rewritten. 6． Secure One of the main sources of vulnerabilities in traditional CGI stems from the fact that the programs are often executed by generalpurpose operating system shells. So, the CGI programmer must be careful to filter out characters such as backquotes and semicolons that are treated specially by the shell. Implementing this precaution is harder than one might think, and weaknesses stemming from this problem are constantly being uncovered in widely used CGI libraries. A second source of problems is the fact that some CGI programs are processed by languages that do not automatically check array or string bounds. For example, in C and C++ it is perfectly legal to allocate a 100element array and then write into the 999th element, which is really some random part of program memory. So, programmers who forget to perform this check open up their system to deliberate or accidental buffer overflow attacks. Servlets suffer from neither of these problems. Even if a servlet executes a system call (., with or JNI) to invoke a program on the local operating system, it does not use a shell to do so. And, of course, array bounds checking and other memory protection features are a central part of the Java programming language. 7． Mainstream There are a lot of good technologies out there. But if vendors don39。ll only be discussing HTTP servlets. The Advantages of Servlets Over Traditional CGI Java servlets are more efficient, easier to use, more powerful, more portable, safer, and cheaper than traditional CGI and many alternative CGIlike technologies. 1． Efficient With traditional CGI, a new process is started for each HTTP request. If the CGI program itself is relatively short, the overhead of starting the process can dominate the execution time. With servlets, the Java virtual machine stays running and handles each request with a lightweight Java thread, not a heavyweight operating system process. Similarly, in traditional CGI, if there are N requests to the same CGI program, the code for the CGI program is loaded into memory N times. With servlets, however, there would be N threads, but only a single copy of the servlet class would be loaded. This approach reduces server memory requirements and saves time by instantiating fewer objects. Finally, when a CGI program finishes handling a request, the program terminates. This approach makes it difficult to cache putations, keep database connections open, and perform other optimizations that rely on persistent data. Servlets, however, remain in memory even after they plete a response, so it is straightforward to store arbitrarily plex data between client requests. 2． Convenient Servlets have an extensive infrastructure for automatically parsing and decoding HTML form data, reading and setting HTTP headers, handling cookies, tracking sessions, and many other such highlevel utilities. In CGI, you have to do much of this yourself. Besides, if you already know the Java programming language, why learn Perl too? You39。t speak HTTP or return results in HTML, so the Web browser can39。s Job Servlets are Java programs that run on Web or application servers, acting as a middle layer between requests ing from Web browsers or other HTTP clients and da