Jetty 9 – Features

Jetty 9 milestone 0 has landed! We are very excited about getting this release of jetty out and into the hands of everyone. A lot of work as gone into reworking fundamentals and this is going to be the best version of jetty yet!

Anyway, as promised a few weeks back, here is a list of some of the big features in jetty-9. By no means an authoritative list of things that have changed, these are many of the high points we think are worthy of a bit of initial focus in jetty-9. One of the features will land in a subsequent milestone releases (pluggable modules) as that is still being refined somewhat, but the rest of them are largely in place and working in our initial testing.
We’ll blog in depth on some of these features over the course of the next couple of months. We are targeting a November official release of Jetty 9.0.0 so keep an eye out. The improved documentation is coming along well and we’ll introduce that shortly. In the meantime, give the initial milestones a whirl and give us feedback on the mailing lists, on twitter (#jettyserver hashtag pls) or directly at some of the conferences we’ll be attending over the next couple of months.
Next Generation Protocols – SPDY, WebSockets, MUX and HTTP/2.0 are actively replacing the venerable HTTP/1.1 protocol. Jetty directly supports these protocols as equals and first class siblings to HTTP/1.1. This means a lighter faster container that is simpler and more flexible to deal with the rapidly changing mix of protocols currently being experienced as HTTP/1.1 is replaced.
Content Push – SPDY v3 supporting including content push within both the client and server. This is a potentially huge optimization for websites that know what a browser will need in terms of javascript files or images, instead of waiting for a browser to ask first.
Improved WebSocket Server and Client

• Fast websocket implementation
• Supporting classic Listener approach and @WebSocket annotations
• Fully compliant to RFC6455 spec (validated via autobahn test suite http://autobahn.ws/testsuite)
• Support for latest versions of Draft WebSocket extensions (permessage-compression, and fragment)

Java 7 – We have removed some areas of abstraction within jetty in order to take advantage of improved APIs in the JVM regarding concurrency and nio, this leads to a leaner implementation and improved performance.
Servlet 3.1 ready – We actively track this developing spec and will be with support, in fact much of the support is already in place.
Asynchronous HTTP client – refactored to simplify API, while retaining the ability to run many thousands of simultaneous requests, used as a basis for much of our own testing and http client needs.
Pluggable Modules – one distribution with integration with libraries, third party technologies, and web applications available for download through a simple command line interface
Improved SSL Support – the proliferation of mobile devices that use SSL has manifested in many atypical client implementations, support for these edge cases in SSL has been thoroughly refactored such that support is now understandable and maintainable by humans
Lightweight – Jetty continues its history of having a very small memory footprint while still being able to scale to many ten’s of thousands of connections on commodity hardware.
Eminently Embeddable – Years of embedding support pays off in your own application, webapp, or testing. Use embedded jetty to unit test your web projects. Add a web server to your existing application. Bundle your web app as a standalone application.