Servlet Mini-Annoyance

Was just putting together a test servlet, and was trying to get some values from a form. Spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong; in the end, I was calling getAttribute() when I should have been calling getParameter(). I still don't know what attributes are; in my case, they're coming up empty (i.e. getAttributeNames() returns an empty enumeration). Ah well.