[servlet-dev] What do we exactly dislike in Servlet?

[arjan tijms <arjan.tijms@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

The topic came up a couple of times that people/vendors dislike "things" in Servlet, and therefore need to exclude it from their products.

For years Servlet was the common way to respond to HTTP requests, but since Servlet is being disliked for some reason, we unfortunately don't have that common HTTP API anymore.

Specifically, the Jakarta EE Core profile does not include Servlet support, which leads to various issues such as the one here: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/jakartaee-tck/issues/1096

In general, I think not having a common HTTP API in Jakarta EE is extremely problematic. Issue 1096 above is only one example of that. It has been discussed in the Servlet spec team before to look at a Servlet-lite profile, but I think we need the input of the other teams to figure out what exactly they dislike so much. If we have a clear list of things that are disliked then those could be potentially excluded from such Servlet-lite profile.

One argument I heard is that Servlets are much, much slower than Jakarta REST. But I'm not quite sure why a Java class that implements jakarta.servlet.Servlet should be slower in any way than a Java class with the @Path annotation.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Arjan Tijms