A Common Mistake in Servlet init Methods

Servlet init methods allows a servlet to perform one-time initialization prior to servicing requests. One common mistake when implementing init method is in this form:

public void init(ServletConfig config)
      throws ServletException {
 //do custom initialization ...
 System.out.println(" init(ServletConfig config) invoked.");
 ...
}

This is wrong because it doesn't invoke super.init(ServletConfig). As a result, ServletConfig is not stored in the servlet instance, and subsequent calls to getServletConfig will return null.

Another variant of this mistake is to store the ServletConfig parameter in a class variable of the concrete servlet class:

private ServletConfig config;

public void init(ServletConfig config)
      throws ServletException {
 this.config = config;
 System.out.println(" init(ServletConfig config) invoked.");
 //do custom initialization ...
 ...
}

This is also wrong because config saved in the current servlet won't be available to its superclass, usually GenericServlet or HttpServlet. When the default implementation of getServletConfig() method looks for ServletConfig in superclasses, it's still null. The only way it can work is that you also override getServletConfig method to look in the concrete servlet class, which is unusual and unnecessary.

This is the error from Glassfish/SJSAS 9.0/JavaEE SDK 5, when running a servlet with those incorrect init methods:

java.lang.NullPointerException
test.HelloWorldServlet.doGet(HelloWorldServlet.java:14)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:707)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:820)
com.sun.enterprise.web.WebPipeline.invoke(WebPipeline.java:73)
com.sun.enterprise.web.VirtualServerPipeline.invoke(VirtualServerPipeline.java:120)
org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:231)

To implement servlet init methods correctly, you have several options:

• If you only need to save ServletConfig, do not override any init methods in servlet class. It's already implemented in servlet superclass GenericServlet.
  


• If you have custom initialization work to do, override the no-arg init() method, and forget about init(ServletConfig). Is it ok to call getServletConfig() method inside the no-arg init() method? Yes, an instance of ServletConfig has already been saved by superclass GenericServlet. See Why Servlet init Methods are Confusing for more details.
  


• If you really want to override init(ServletConfig), make sure you invoke super.init(ServletConfig);, usually as the first line, though it's not strictly required.
  

Tags: servlet, JavaEE, J2EE, Java, servlet init, ServletConfig, servlet lifecycle