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Jetty/FAQ
Contents
- 1 General
- 1.1 Why is it called Jetty?
- 1.2 Is Jetty production ready?
- 1.3 Who uses Jetty?
- 1.4 Why use Jetty?
- 1.5 What's the difference between Jetty from Mort Bay, Codehaus and/or Eclipse?
- 1.6 How do I ask a question?
- 1.7 How do I know which version of Jetty I am running?
- 1.8 Is commercial support available?
- 1.9 Is Jetty 7 a drop in replacement for Jetty 6?
- 2 Developing with Jetty
- 3 Others
General
Why is it called Jetty?
Jetty was originally developed by Greg Wilkins of Mort Bay Consulting in 1995!
Mort Bay is at the heart of Balmain, Sydney NSW, Australia. A former working class suburb, now yuppieville in Sydney's close inner-west. Greg was living by Mort Bay when the company was formed, hence the company name.
Jetty was originally called IssueTracker (its original application) and then MBServler (Mort Bay SERVLet servER). Neither of these were much liked, so Jetty was finally picked as:
- it starts with a J
- the double tt in jetty:// looks a little like http://
- there is a jetty in the Mort Bay logo.
- there were no better suggestions.
Is Jetty production ready?
Yes. Since 1995, Jetty powers hundreds of thousands of websites, serving millions of users and is embedded in thousands of products and projects.
Who uses Jetty?
Jetty has a huge variety of users:
- Large clusters, such as the Yahoo Hadoop Cluster
- Cloud computing, such as the Google AppEngine
- SaaS, such as Yahoo! Zimbra
- Application Servers, such as Apache Geronimo
- Frameworks, such as GWT
- Tools, such as the Eclipse IDE
- Devices, such as phones
Why use Jetty?
Some of the reasons to use Jetty over other available options are:
- Jetty is Open source with a commercially usable license.
- Jetty has a small foot print, yet is full featured and standards based.
- Jetty is flexible and extensible, so that if your application/deployment is not a standard webapp, Jetty can easily be customized.
- Jetty provides asynchronous HTTP handling within the safe standard servlet API model, without the need to program at the asynchronous IO level.
- Jetty has an innovative, responsive and approachable developer community.
What's the difference between Jetty from Mort Bay, Codehaus and/or Eclipse?
The latest releases of core jetty-7 and later are available from Eclipse, which use the org.eclipse.jetty packaging. For versions 6 of Jetty, plus some jetty-7 components such as RPMs, Debs, Hightide, use codehaus, which uses the org.mortbay packaging. For more information on this topic see About Jetty.
How do I ask a question?
You can get some help from the Jetty community by posting a question to #jetty on irc.freenode.org or to the jetty-users@eclipse.org mailing list. When posting, please be sure to have available as a minimum the following information:
- Jetty version
- Browser version
- OS platform
- JVM version
- Command line
- Full stack trace of any exceptions
If your problem involves a complex webapp, please try and provide us with just a small webapp instead that also demonstrates the problem.
Debug logs, packet traces from tools such as ethereal or copies of the HTTP dialog as captured by tools such as Firefox "Live HTTP Headers" are always useful.
How do I know which version of Jetty I am running?
Locate the start.jar in your distribution. Then use the "--version" flag:
java -jar start.jar -- version
Is commercial support available?
Yes. See Webtide.
Is Jetty 7 a drop in replacement for Jetty 6?
No, while Jetty 7 has very much the same architecture as Jetty 6, there are packaging changes and other minor tweaks between the versions. Also, the Jetty 7 milestones are not as fully featured as Jetty 6 in terms of third party integrations being available by default with the distribution bundle. Please see the Upgrades section of our Getting Started documentation.
Developing with Jetty
How do I get started?
See the Getting Started guide.
Are Maven 2 artifacts available?
Yes, Jetty is developed with Maven and artefacts are available at
What JARs do I need to run Jetty.
The core of Jetty has no external dependencies other that the servlet-api. See the Jetty Dependencies reference.
Others
Can you recommend some useful web developer tools?
Yes!
These tools have nothing to do specifically with Jetty; they're just a list of tools we find useful in developing and diagnosing misbehaving webapps:
Browsers and GUI Tools
- Firefox - open source browser.
- Web Developer plugin for Firefox - all sorts of tools to help you develop and debug your HTML and CSS.
- Firebug plugin for Firefox - DOM inspector plus a lot more.
- Poster Plugin for Firefox - lets you do POSTs, GETs, PUTs, etc and see the results.
- DOM Inspector plugin for Firefox - DOM inspector.
- Venkman plugin for Firefox - legendary javascript debugger.
Http Protocol Analysis
- LiveHttpHeaders plugin for Firefox - shows you the HTTP dialog between browser and server.
- Tamper Data plugin for Firefox - shows you the HTTP dialog and allows you to modify
- Wireshark - network protocol analyzer.