The 2.4 servlet specification is definitely a much better specification than it's forerunners, with the main achievement being the extension of Filters to be an integral part of all request dispatching within a container. There have also been numerous small but valuable clarifications that have not been covered by this article but are listed in SRV.S.16.

Unfortunately significant problems remain in the specification, some new ones have been added and some much requested features have been deferred. Other changes are at best of dubious added value and the benefits or otherwise of the structural and procedural changes represented by the J2EE based schema's have yet to play out.

Hopefully, most of these issues will be below the radar of your average servlet user as IDE's, tools and web frameworks are already doing much of the work to deal directly with the servlet API. Developers should be encouraged to start evaluations of containers supporting this revision.