Chapter 27. Programming with Servlets

Web applications can serve static or dynamic content. Some examples of static content are text files with HTML markup, images, and video. Dynamic content is formed on the fly. Think of a web application that enables you to browse the inventory of an online store. The content you see on your screen is being created based on your queries — in other words, dynamically.

In the Java EE world, web content is served either by a program running in a container with deployed servlets, JSP, JSF, or a third-party framework, or it's a SOAP or RESTful Web Service. Servlets, JSP, and JSF not only return the data, but also present it as formatted HTML pages, hence the term presentation layer (refer to Figure 26-1). Web Services, on the other hand, return just the data (see Lesson 34).