Why Servlets

Servlets may be used at different levels on a distributed framework. The following are some examples of servlet usage:

To accept form input and generate HTML Web pages dynamically.

As part of middle tiers in enterprise networks by connecting to SQL databases via JDBC.

In conjunction with applets to provide a high degree of interactivity and dynamic Web content generation.

For collaborative applications such as online conferencing.

A community of servlets could act as active agents which share data with each other.

Servlets could be used for balancing load among servers which mirror the same content.

Protocol support is one of the most viable uses for servlets. For example, a file service can start with NFS and move on to as many protocols as desired; the transfer between the protocols would be made transparent by servlets. Servlets could be used for tunneling over HTTP to provide chat, newsgroup or other file server functions.