Displaying Date in Servlet

In this example we are going to show how we can display a current date and time on our browser. It is very easy to display it on our browser by using the Date class of the java.util package.

Displaying Date in Servlet

Displaying Date in Servlet

     

In this example we are going to show how we can display a current date and time on our browser. It is very easy to display it on our browser by using the Date class of the java.util package. 

As we know that the our servlet extends the HttpServlet and overrides the doGet() method which it inherits from the HttpServlet class. The server invokes doGet() method  whenever web server recieves the GET request from the servlet. The doGet() method takes two arguments first is HttpServletRequest object and the second one is HttpServletResponse object and this method throws the ServletException.

Whenever the user sends the request to the server then server generates two obects, first is HttpServletRequest object and the second one is HttpServletResponse object. HttpServletRequest object represents the client's request and the HttpServletResponse represents the servlet's response. 

Inside the doGet(() method our servlet has first used the setContentType() method of the response object which sets the content type of the response to text/html. It is the standard MIME content type for the Html pages. The MIME type tells the browser what kind of data the browser is about to receive. After that it has used the method getWriter() of the response object to retrieve a PrintWriter object.  To display the output on the browser we use the println() method of the PrintWriter class. 

The code the program is given below:

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;

public class DisplayingDate extends HttpServlet{
   public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse
  response
throws ServletException, IOException{
  PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter();
  Date today = new Date();
  pw.println("<html>"+"<body><h1>Today Date is</h1>");
  pw.println("<b>"+ today+"</b></body>""</html>");
  }
}

XML File for this program

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!--<!DOCTYPE web-app
 PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
 "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd"> -->

<web-app>
 <servlet>
  <servlet-name>Hello</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>DateDisplay</servlet-class>
 </servlet>
 <servlet-mapping>
 <servlet-name>Hello</servlet-name>
 <url-pattern>/DateDisplay</url-pattern>
 </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

 The output of the program is given below:

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