Servlet containers are also known as web container, for example Tomcat. Some of the important tasks of servlet container are:
Communication Support: Servlet Container provides easy way of communication between web client (Browsers) and the servlets and JSPs. Because of container, we don’t need to build a server socket to listen for any request from web client, parse the request and generate response. All these important and complex tasks are done by container and all we need to focus is on business logic for the applications.
Lifecycle and Resource Management: Servlet Container takes care of managing the life cycle of servlet. From the loading of servlets into memory, initializing servlets, invoking servlet methods and to destroy them. Container also provides utility like JNDI for resource pooling and management.
Multithreading Support: Container creates new thread for every request to the servlet and provide them request and response objects to process. So servlets are not initialized for each request and saves time and memory.
JSP Support: JSPs doesn’t look like normal java classes but every JSP in the application is compiled by container and converted to Servlet and then container manages them like other servlets.
Miscellaneous Task: Servlet container manages the resource pool, perform memory optimizations, execute garbage collector, provides security configurations, support for multiple applications, hot deployment and several other tasks behind the scene that makes a developer life easier.
