Annotations and the Servlet 3 Specification

Now I'm seriously beginning to wonder about the authors of the Java Servlet 3 specification. This time, it's not their architectural wisdom (or the lack of it) regarding session state. It's about something even more basic to the Java language - the nature of annotations.

Chapter 8 deals with annotations that developers may use to mark their classes. Anything about the following strike you as crazy?

Classes annotated with @WebServlet class (sic) MUST extend the javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet class.
[...]
Classes annotated with @WebFilter MUST implement javax.servlet.Filter.

If we must extend a base class anyway, I wonder what the annotation is for. Just to avoid putting a few lines of config code into the web.xml file?

I would have thought an annotation like @WebServlet would be capable of turning any POJO into a servlet class, not just subclasses of HttpServlet! And we could have annotations like @GetMethod, @PostMethod, @PutMethod and @DeleteMethod to annotate any arbitrary methods in the class. We shouldn't have to rely on overriding the doGet(), doPost(), doPut() and doDelete() methods.

The same applies with @WebFilter. It could be used to annotate any arbitrary class, and @FilterMethod could then annotate any arbitrary method in the class.

Look at the way JSR 311 and Spring REST work.

I'm disappointed in the Servlet spec committee. If you're going to use annotations, then use them smartly.

It wouldn't be out of place here to comment on the horrific class hierarchy of the Servlet spec. It certainly shows the era from which it began, an era where interfaces were underappreciated and inheritance hierarchies featured classes themselves. Naming conventions hadn't matured yet, either.

E.g., my application's concrete class "MyServlet" must either extend abstract class "GenericServlet", which in turn partially implements interface "Servlet", or implement "Servlet" directly. This by itself isn't so bad, but go ahead a bit.

My application's concrete class "MyHttpServlet" must only extend abstract class "HttpServlet" which extends abstract class "GenericServlet", which in turn partially implements interface "Servlet". There is no interface to implement.

And why GenericServlet should also implement ServletConfig is something I don't understand. There's a HAS-A relationship between a servlet and its configuration. It's not an IS-A relationship.

HttpServlet should have been an interface extending Servlet.

The abstract class GenericServlet (that partially implements the Servlet interface) should have been called AbstractServlet instead, and there could have been a concrete convenience class called SimpleServlet or BasicServlet that extended AbstractServlet and provided a default implementation that subclasses could override.

Similarly, there should have been an abstract class called AbstractHttpServlet that partially implemented the HttpServlet interface and only provided a concrete service() method, dispatching requests to doXXX() methods that remained unimplemented. There could have been a concrete convenience class called SimpleHttpServlet or BasicHttpServlet that extended the AbstractHttpServlet class and provided a default implementation that subclasses could override.

My application's concrete classes should have had the option to implement one of the interfaces directly or to extend one of the abstract or convenience classes.

Oh well, too late now.