servlets -- resources?

[Soren Aalto <soren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Two questions -- early in the new year and all...

- where is a good place to ask questions about Servlets?
I recall that a couple people on this list were doing some
servlet/java work.

Specifically, I have an application that I wrote that
uses both servlets to handle HTTP requests and also 
does gets data in from clients over straight TCP
connections.

Problem is, the servlet container I was using (Acme.Serve)
is stoneaged and I want to use something newer -- I'm
looking at Resin, and also have had a brief look at
Apache/Tomcat (but had trouble getting it to run).

What is the best way to implement a straight request/response
message I/F in a Servlet container?  I.e., I want to connect
to the server, send a line of text and get a response back,
send another line of text, get a response back.

I don't see any easy way to start up my server automagically
when the servlet container is started -- no code that I write
gets called until an HTTP request comes in, AFAICT.

I also wonder if there isn't some clever way to subclass
javax.servlet.Servlet so that it is much "lighter" than
straight HTTP?

- second question: anybody have trouble with Blackdown JDK1.2.1.
Two funnies I have seen,

  - when running my Servlet application above, the JVM
    segfaults every couple of days.  No exceptions or
    anything that suggests a problem with the java code,
    just a "Segmentation fault" message.  I looked at
    a core file in gdb, but didn't see anything enlightening.
  - Tomcat didn't seem to want to run under Blackdown JDK,
    but did run under SunJDK1.2.2 under Win98.  Near as I
    could figure out, Tomcat does some wierd things to
    cause times socket exceptions to implement something
    akin to a select() loop.  Only the exception that gets
    thrown under Blackdown isn't what Tomcat expects, and
    Tomcat dies on the first HTTP request.

--
Soren Aalto <soren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Internet guy, University of Zululand 
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time
Windows crashed...oh wait, he does.