Yes. But you will not get the servlet specific things from constructor. So do not use constructor instead of init(). The original reason for init() was that ancient versions of Java couldn\'t dynamically invoke constructors with arguments, so there was no way to give the constructur a ServletConfig. That no longer applies, but servlet containers still will only call your no-arg constructor so you won\'t have access to a ServletConfig or ServletContext. Plus, all the other servlet programmers are going to expect your init code to be in init().