> 26 Jan 1999 - It's official: JavaSoft wants to keep servlets focused
> on web technology and considers the actual separation of
> GenericServlet and HTTPServlet a mistake due to last minute reordering
> of the interfaces. For this reason, the official servlet API will stay
> focused on web only. This granted, the James project will continue the
> design of the MailServlet API focusing on mail functionality and
> general servlet lifecycle
>
> ___________________
>
> Some explanation please, because I don't understand the "mistake"
> about actual separation of GenericServlet and HTTPServlet due to last
> minute reordering of the interfaces .... ??
What that means is that, early in the 1.0 development of the servlet
api, there was one set of interfaces. Before release, this was split
into a generic and non generic set in the hope that the api would be
easily adaptable to other protocols besides HTTP. In the intervening few
years, we've tried to make other protocols fit into this api (*lots* of
other protocols), others have proposed ways of doing it, and we haven't
yet seen a proposal that makes enough sense to put the time and effort
into standardization. In retrospect, it is felt by many of us at
JavaSoftware that it would have been better to have a single set of
interfaces instead of the dual set that we have now.
When the author wrote that paragraph, they were translating that view of
the world. It is not quite factually complete, but its pretty close. For
now and the foreseeable future, we are only focused on HTTP servlets and
are not going to pursue any other protocol for the servlet api.
Now, it has to be said that Mail is the one protocol that almost made
sense to standardize. Mail is about Mime based inputs and outputs.
However, the point at which the model breaks down is that the mime
output from a mail server goes to some other source than the requester,
whereas the servlet api is pretty clearly structured to give mime bodies
responses to the same client that sent a mime bodied request. It's my
feeling that a good Mail processing api would be limited by the servlet
api and it should be an independent api. I disagree with the "when you
have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" concept.
One more point, nowhere have we said that third parties can't adapt the
servlet api to other protocols and see how things go. What we have said
is that we aren't going to officially standardize any other protocol.
.duncan
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