Difference about requestdistpatcher and sendredirect

requestdispatcher vs sendredirect.txt

First of all, the term "redirect" is in web development world the action of sending the client an empty HTTP response with just a Location header with therein the new URL on which the client has to send a brand new GET request. So basically:

    Client sends a HTTP request to some.jsp.
    Server sends a HTTP response back with Location: other.jsp header
    Client sends a HTTP request to other.jsp (this get reflected in browser address bar!)
    Server sends a HTTP response back with content of other.jsp.

You can track it with the webbrowser's builtin/addon developer toolset. Press F12 in Chrome/IE9/Firebug and check the "Network" section to see it.

Exactly the above is achieved by sendRedirect("other.jsp"). The RequestDispatcher#forward() doesn't send a redirect. Instead, it uses the content of the target page as HTTP response.

    Client sends a HTTP request to some.jsp.
    Server sends a HTTP response back with content of other.jsp.

However as the original HTTP request was to some.jsp, the URL in browser address bar remains unchanged.

The RequestDispatcher is extremely useful in the MVC paradigm and/or when you want to hide JSP's from direct access. You can put JSP's in /WEB-INF folder and use a Servlet which controls, preprocesses and postprocesses the requests. The JSPs in /WEB-INF folder are not directly accessible by URL, but the Servlet can access them using RequestDispatcher#forward().

You can for example have a JSP file in /WEB-INF/login.jsp and a LoginServlet which is mapped on an url-pattern of /login. When you invoke http://example.com/context/login, then the servlet's doGet() will be invoked. You can do any preprocessing stuff in there and finally forward the request like:

request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/login.jsp").forward(request, response);

When you submit a form, you normally want to use POST:

<form action="login" method="post">

This way the servlet's doPost() will be invoked and you can do any postprocessing stuff in there (e.g. validation, business logic, login the user, etc).

If there are any errors, then you normally want to forward the request back to the same page and display the errors there next to the input fields and so on. You can use the RequestDispatcher for this.

If a POST is been successful, you normally want to redirect the request, so that the request won't be resubmitted when the user refreshes the request (e.g. pressing F5 or navigating back in history).

User user = userDAO.find(username, password);
if (user != null) {
    request.getSession().setAttribute("user", user); // Login user.
    response.sendRedirect("home"); // Redirects to http://example.com/context/home after succesful login.
} else {
    request.setAttribute("error", "Unknown login, please try again."); // Set error.
    request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/login.jsp").forward(request, response); // Forward to same page so that you can display error.
}

A redirect thus instructs the client to fire a new GET request on the given URL. Refreshing the request would then only refresh the redirected request and not the initial request. This will avoid "double submits" and confusion and bad user experience. This is also called the POST-Redirect-GET pattern.