Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems. Personal use only; do not redistribute.

7.2 HTTP 1.1 Response Headers and Their Meaning

149

unregistered types. The default MIME type for servlets is 

text/plain

, 

but servlets usually explicitly specify 

text/html

. They can, however, 

specify other types instead. For example, Section 7.5 (Using Servlets to 

Generate GIF Images) presents a servlet that builds a GIF image based 

upon input provided by specifying the 

image/gif

 content type, and 

Section 11.2 (The contentType Attribute) shows how servlets and JSP 

pages can generate Excel spreadsheets by specifying a content type of 

application/vnd.ms excel

.

Table 7.1 lists some the most common MIME types used by servlets. 

For more detail, many of the common MIME types are listed in RFC 

1521 and RFC 1522 (again, see 

http://www.rfc editor.org/

 for a 

list of RFC archive sites). However, new MIME types are registered all 

the time, so a dynamic list is a better place to look. The officially regis 

tered types are listed at 

http://www.isi.edu/in notes/iana/assign 

ments/media types/media types

. For common unregistered types, 

http://www.ltsw.se/knbase/internet/mime.htp

 is a good source. 

Table 7.1

Common MIME Types 

Type

Meaning

application/msword

Microsoft Word document

application/octet stream

Unrecognized or binary data

application/pdf

Acrobat (.pdf) file

application/postscript

PostScript file

application/vnd.lotus notes

Lotus Notes file

application/vnd.ms excel

Excel spreadsheet

application/vnd.ms powerpoint

Powerpoint presentation

application/x gzip

Gzip archive

application/x java archive

JAR file

application/x java serial 

Serialized Java object

ized object

application/x java vm

Java bytecode (.class) file

Second edition of this book: www.coreservlets.com; Sequel: www.moreservlets.com.

Servlet and JSP training courses by book's author: courses.coreservlets.com.