Introduction to DesktopServlet

The DesktopServlet coordinates the drawing of the Desktop, dispatches the process to the target channel based on the information stored in the underlining services, and validates the user with the Sun Java System Access Manager software.

In this sense, the DesktopServlet is a router of requests. It catches requests for content and processing, and passes them on to the specific provider object. Whenever a provider throws an exception that cannot be handled by the container provider, the exception will propagate all the way up to the DesktopServlet, and the DesktopServlet will display an error page.

For detailed information on how the DesktopServlet creates and validates a user session and creates and gets the provider context object, see the The Provider Life Cycle The following sections only describe how the DesktopServlet handles the various actions.