How Java Web Servers Work

this article is adapted from Budi Kurniawan's self-published book on Tomcat internals. You can find more information on his web site.

A web server is also called a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server because it uses HTTP to communicate with its clients, which are usually web browsers. A Java-based web server uses two important classes, java.net.Socket and java.net.ServerSocket, and communicates through HTTP messages. Therefore, this article starts by discussing of HTTP and the two classes. Afterwards, I'll explain the simple web server application that accompanies this article.