[java] calling a java servlet from javascript

I am trying to create a web application using the MVC design pattern. For the GUI part I would like to use JavaScript. And for the controller Java Servlets.

Now I have never really worked with JavaScript, so I'm having a hard time figuring out how to call a Java Servlet from JavaScript and how to get the response from the Servlet.

Can anybody help me out?

Sorry, I read jsp not javascript. You need to do something like (note that this is a relative url and may be different depending on the url of the document this javascript is in):

document.location = 'path/to/servlet';

Where your servlet-mapping in web.xml looks something like this:

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>someServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/path/to/servlet*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

   function callServlet()


{
 document.getElementById("adminForm").action="./Administrator";
 document.getElementById("adminForm").method = "GET";
 document.getElementById("adminForm").submit();

}

<button type="submit"  onclick="callServlet()" align="center"> Register</button>

I really recommend you use jquery for the javascript calls and some implementation of JSR311 like jersey for the service layer, which would delegate to your controllers.

This will help you with all the underlying logic of handling the HTTP calls and your data serialization, which is a big help.

var button = document.getElementById("<<button-id>>");
button.addEventListener("click", function() {
  window.location.href= "<<full-servlet-path>>" (eg. http://localhost:8086/xyz/servlet)
});

The code here will use AJAX to print text to an HTML5 document dynamically (Ajax code is similar to book Internet & WWW (Deitel)):

Javascript code:

var asyncRequest;    
function start(){
    try
    {
        asyncRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
        asyncRequest.addEventListener("readystatechange", stateChange, false);
        asyncRequest.open('GET', '/Test', true);    //   /Test is url to Servlet!
        asyncRequest.send(null);
    }
    catch(exception)
   {
    alert("Request failed");
   }
}

function stateChange(){
if(asyncRequest.readyState == 4 && asyncRequest.status == 200)
    {
    var text = document.getElementById("text");         //  text is an id of a 
    text.innerHTML = asyncRequest.responseText;         //  div in HTML document
    }
}

window.addEventListener("load", start(), false);

Servlet java code:

public class Test extends HttpServlet{
@Override
public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp)
    throws IOException{
        resp.setContentType("text/plain");
        resp.getWriter().println("Servlet wrote this! (Test.java)");
    }
}

HTML document

 <div id = "text"></div>

EDIT

I wrote answer above when I was new with web programming. I let it stand, but the javascript part should definitely be in jQuery instead, it is 10 times easier than raw javascript.