Defines a set of methods that a servlet uses to communicate with its servlet container, for example, to get the MIME type of a file, dispatch requests, or write to a log file.
There is one context per "web application" per Java Virtual Machine. (A "web application" is a collection of servlets and content installed under a specific subset of the server‘s URL namespace such as
/catalog and possibly installed via a .war file.)
In the case of a web application marked "distributed" in its deployment descriptor, there will be one context instance for each virtual machine. In this situation, the context cannot be used as a location to share global information (because the information won‘t be truly global). Use an external resource like a database instead.
The ServletContext object is contained within the
ServletConfig object, which the Web server provides the servlet when the servlet is initialized.
原文地址：http://blog.csdn.net/hephec/article/details/39649689
