How to use Cookies with Java Servlets

Cookies are pieces of data that an HTTP client can be asked to associate with a web site or subsection of a web site1. Whenever the client requests a page, it sends along with the request any cookies that it was previously asked to associate with that web site and/or page. Cookies are used for cases where we need to "maintain state" across HTTP requests. In the real world, this typically means for the following purposes:

It's actually not so common to manipulate cookies directly. In the common case of handling sessions, the Java Servlet framework provides a Session API. If you're implementing sessions, it's generally a good idea to use the API designed for that purpose, for a few reasons:

All that said, if you do want to manually set and read cookies from a Java Sevlet, then a Cookie API is provided.


1. Technically, cookies are restricted to a particular domain or subdomain and potentially a specific path of that domain/subdomain.


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