If you hadn't guessed it from my last 3000(ish) java-related posts, I'm a Java n00b writing a Java Applet for a work project. I got to the part was I was about to write the applet code that would send HTTP requests to my CGI scripts. But I read some paragraphs in a book praising Java servlets as better that CGI because they are easier to use and give much better performance server side.

My server load isn't very big, though, and I was wondering if it would be worth taking the time to learn about Java servlets and how to set up the server side configuration on my Fedora web server. Any helpful thoughts?

Servlets are pretty fast and easy to write - the question is probably more about 'appropriate'. If your project is already in a language, you should probably just continue in that language. If not, it's not hard to create a basic servlet.

I used to create simple ones pretty frequently until I dropped Java in 2006 or so (in favor of other methods)

If I might ask (just curious) what "other methods" did you move onto after you dropped Java?

It varies, depending on what the servlet did. Many of them ended up becoming XML feeds and the like, or simple database connection pools. In some cases the heavy lifting moved around a bit - what was once a thick client that connected to a servlet for data abstracted from a database (or several databases) became a web client served up by server-side XML and PHP with client-side Javascript.

Some of the apps were converted to .NET if the app tier was based on Windows or SQL Server as opposed to Oracle/DB2/MySQL or whatnot.

I guess the answer is "no one thing". I tended to write simple servlets, so really they were usually just some sort of aggregation, sorting, SOA, security, or abstraction layer. That's a pretty easy thing to replace.