learning java

[dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

Well it's not a "you suck" but accusing me of purposely confusing 
candidates is in the same ballpark :)...

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Adam Russell wrote:
> Duane Morin wrote:
> >* When working with servlets, what's the difference between a redirect and 
> >a forward?  What is a servlet filter and how is it different from a 
> >servlet forward?
> >
> I think what you really want to say is "servlet chaining" not "servlet 
> forwarding".  Unless you mean something different from the accepted 
> terminology or try to purposely confuse candidates.

Note that I said "a forward", first of all.  Second, I quote the API at 
you, from
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/sdk_1.3/techdocs/api/javax/servlet/RequestDispatcher.html

forward

public void forward(ServletRequest request,
                    ServletResponse response)
             throws ServletException,
                    java.io.IOException

    Forwards a request from a servlet to another resource (servlet, JSP 
file, or HTML file) on the server. This method allows one servlet to do 
preliminary processing of a request and another resource to generate the 
response.


Now perhaps I'll be accused of hypocrisy on my "no memorizing the API" 
questions, but I'd like to think that if you've ever *done* it, regardless 
of what you *called* it, then you could recognize that you may have seen 
the word 'forward' before when dealing with your servlets.  It's 
additional was a fairly substantial piece of functionality.  Asking 
something like  "What object handles the forward() method" would be the 
sort of thing I would not ask.

To be fair, I may adjust my questioning and ask "How do you implement 
servlet chaining" or something like that and see if more people 
understand it.


Duane