Jim Driscoll's Blog

Servlet History

I've been doing servlets and JSPs longer than any other person on the planet (which in itself is a story for another time), so when I read a few things about the history of servlets in Beyond Java by Bruce Tate, I cringed. But I realize that such ancient history (10 years ago!) isn't recorded anywhere, so I thought that I'd set the record straight.

In his book, Bruce says: "In the halls of Netscape, server-side Java emerged. Servlets (a term originally coined by O'Reilly) made server-driven Internet applications available to application developers. Sun capitalized on this movement quickly with a standard, and an open source implementation of a servlet engine called Tomcat."

Whoosh, where to start. Prehaps at the beginning:

Servlets were originally conceived of by James Gosling in 1995, but put aside for other interests. After some time, the concept was picked up by Pavani Diwanji, who built on the concept to create servlets as part of a project then called Jeeves (from a fictional character). This project was eventually productized into the Java Web Server, which many of us in Java EE land remember fondly to this day. I still have a shirt showing Duke in a Tux holding a platter, the symbol for Java Web Server. And incidently, the first versions of the servlet package were called java.servlet.*, since the javax extension hadn't been invented yet.

Incidently, JSP was invented over a weekend by Anselm Baird-Smith, then later elaborated on as a specification by Satish Dharmaraj (now of Zimbra). (Just in case anyone was curious.)

The server-side Java container conceived of by Netscape was done as a parallel effort, as was another similar thing done by Oracle. (I was part of the team that visited both companies to try to sell them on this technology.)

The Tomcat stuff came a few years later, as did the first version of the servlet spec, written by James Davidson.

As for O'Reilly coining the term servlets, I don't know for sure about that, but given the history I do know, I'm skeptical.

There, I've gotten that off my chest.

Know something I don't? Please comment below.

Comments

• I don't know whether you know that the Weekly World News will keep on selling papers and Bruce Tate will keep selling books, despite reality and despite corrections. Because "enquiring minds want to know."

  Posted by: mikaelhg on December 10, 2005 at 09:50 PM

• Thanks for pointing out the real story...I don't know where Bruce got his from?

  Posted by: thanneru on December 11, 2005 at 10:54 PM

• "JSP was invented over a weekend by Anselm Baird-Smith"
  So you've actually been doing servlets and JSPs longer than any other person on the planet except Anselm ;-)
  

  Posted by: johnreynolds on December 12, 2005 at 06:36 AM

• I remember reading Better, Faster, Lighter Java. The first example he gave, well the only example if I remember right, was showing how EJB was a bad technology because it required you to have alot of classes to print "Hello World". Supposedly I had to read another book of his to understand his viewpoint as to why EJB is bad. I thought about getting Beyond Java but after looking at how he lightly he dismissed Python as a language I put it back on the shelf. Doesn't objecting to a language because of whitespace seem a little shallow? I program in it Jython alot and I never ever think about whitespace. Why? Well because I indent that way anyway to show off the logical structure of my code. Thankfully Swing Hacks was close to it on the book shelf and it has more than payed for itself. What a fun book.

  leouser

  Posted by: leouser on December 12, 2005 at 11:22 AM

• Tomcat was an apache project that later was adopted by Sun much later. The first servlet container was Sun's little servletrunner.

  Posted by: xod on December 12, 2005 at 11:52 AM

• And didn't Tomcat follow the Apaceh JServ project?

  Posted by: javanethannes on December 13, 2005 at 01:43 AM

• I remember Tomcat was born when Sun donated to Apache the Servlet spec RI, and them Apache stopped working with JServ, meging this code to what became Tomcat. And Tomcat took some time to catch with JServ feature set.

  Jim, it would be nice if you and other Sun people, alongside with Jakarta people, spare some time to write a detailed history of the servlet and jsp beginings and evolution.

  Posted by: flozano on December 13, 2005 at 04:11 AM

• John -

  Anselm, Satish, etc are no longer doing servlets or JSP. They're doing other thing,s and inventing other things. So yeah, I've been doing it longest. Not exactly something to be super-proud of :-)

  Posted by: driscoll on December 13, 2005 at 05:55 PM

• Yep, the Tomcat group was formed from the merge of Apache JServ and Sun's codebase (which wasn't servletrunner, IIRC). They used Sun's code, and Apache ownership and processes. I just gave a talk on this at ApacheCon.

  I wasn't in on it at the beginning, though I was there within the year. I've always wanted to write a history, but the idea of it makes me uneasy, since histories happen after something's over, and we're aren't done quite yet.

  I'm curious - is this something that others would find interesting?

  Posted by: driscoll on December 13, 2005 at 06:02 PM

• Jim,
  Yes, please. I came here from the Wikipedia entry on Servlet, and was curious as to the history.

  Posted by: hobart on January 21, 2006 at 08:52 PM

• Hey Jim, if you want to record the history, I'll help. I actually have lots of notes from book writing. Notes from 4/18/1997:

  "I finished reading about servlets from the server-java site. I also printed out the slides from JavaOne. I'm ready to talk with Jim Driscoll. We've scheduled him to come by next Tuesday morning for lunch at Michael's so we can talk. I need to have my notes cleaned up and some questions ready!!"

  -jh-
  

  Posted by: jhunter on March 10, 2006 at 11:24 AM

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