An Event Listener is a class that implements one or more of the event listener interfaces included with the Java Servlet API, version 1.3. The interfaces are used for four different kinds of events that can be monitored by an event listener: The event listeners are listed in the order that they are invoked. One example of an event listener is a servlet context listener class that manages a database connection. When the application starts, the listener class is notified so that it can log on to the database and store the connection in the servlet context. When the web server is shut down, or the application is removed from the web server, the listener is notified so that it can close the database connection.