The SquizLog

Impressed by Jetty

Until the last couple of days I'd only heard in passing about Jetty, a 100% Java HTTP Server and Servlet Container.

One of our projects at work, for reasons that I won't go into here, requires a local test environment for each developer that uses up most of the 1 GB of RAM. Only a small part of the system is a web application that exposes a few web services.

Now we would normally use the WebSphere Test Environment within Rational Software Architect to test web applications during development. But in this case it's overkill. The webapp is stable and WTE requires too much memory.

Enter Jetty. The tutorial showed me how to quickly get Jetty up and running. So far, so good. But what I really wanted was to run Jetty inside the IDE. Enter the Jetty Launcher Eclipse Plugin, which was very easy to set up and meant I didn't need to export the WAR and include a definition of the webapp in a Jetty XML file.

So I'm impressed by what Jetty has provided for this particular purpose. Added to that, I'm glad to know that it originated in Balmain (courtesy of Mort Bay Consulting), not far from our office in Sydney!

Posted to Software Development by Keith Pitty