5 Minutes with Jetty During JavaOne 2009

The reception on the Webtide booth was already quite agile since they asked me to open the help system in Eclipse, and Jetty was already there - awesome!

Tell me about Jetty.

Jetty is both a web application server and a web client server, because you have the HTTP server and you also have some asynchronous features that enabled the Jetty to be used also as middleware between its clients and another servers. If a web application is dependent on external services and Jetty receives a call, the application can suspend the request while waiting the response from the external services. Once it receives this response Jetty wake up the process and do respond the original request.

Cool, what else is remarkable about Jetty?

We believe a good news is about the adoption of Jetty as the Google App Engine Java service and also the perception that Jetty is adopted everywhere like Android Phones and several other devices and systems.

And compared to other servers? Where is the market of Jetty and where it is preferable to use another servers?

Jetty is a first class HTTP server, so if your application is distributed on the web in a pure RESTful way, Jetty should be your choice because it is robust, scalable and very fast. It is excellent for example to distribute embedded servers over the cloud due to its very small footprint. From the other point of view, if you need something outside HTTP like EJBs, you can continue to use Jetty to serve the HTTP contents but you will need something else to support the non-HTTP contents.

The last question I have is about the company, who is behind the Jetty?

Webtide is an american company founded in 1995 in Los Angeles (Java 0.9), we were the first HTTP server produced with Java. Today we have offices on Italy, Australia and Philippines. We are less than a dozen developers but we believe we can leverage good quality while we focus in simplicity.

Greg Wilkins and Adam Lieber at the Jetty Booth JavaOne 2009

From http://weblogs.java.net/blog/felipegaucho