calling a java servlet from javascript

So you want to fire Ajax calls to the servlet? For that you need the XMLHttpRequest object in JavaScript. Here's a Firefox compatible example:

<script>
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
        if (xhr.readyState == 4) {
            var data = xhr.responseText;
            alert(data);
        }
    }
    xhr.open('GET', '${pageContext.request.contextPath}/myservlet', true);
    xhr.send(null);
</script>

This is however very verbose and not really crossbrowser compatible. For the best crossbrowser compatible way of firing ajaxical requests and traversing the HTML DOM tree, I recommend to grab jQuery. Here's a rewrite of the above in jQuery:

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js"></script>
<script>
    $.get('${pageContext.request.contextPath}/myservlet', function(data) {
        alert(data);
    });
</script>

Either way, the Servlet on the server should be mapped on an url-pattern of /myservlet (you can change this to your taste) and have at least doGet() implemented and write the data to the response as follows:

String data = "Hello World!";
response.setContentType("text/plain");
response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
response.getWriter().write(data);

This should show Hello World! in the JavaScript alert.

You can of course also use doPost(), but then you should use 'POST' in xhr.open() or use $.post() instead of $.get() in jQuery.

Then, to show the data in the HTML page, you need to manipulate the HTML DOM. For example, you have a

<div id="data"></div>

in the HTML where you'd like to display the response data, then you can do so instead of alert(data) of the 1st example:

document.getElementById("data").firstChild.nodeValue = data;

In the jQuery example you could do this in a more concise and nice way:

$('#data').text(data);

To go some steps further, you'd like to have an easy accessible data format to transfer more complex data. Common formats are XML and JSON. For more elaborate examples on them, head to How to use Servlets and Ajax?

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.

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.