Jetty and Glassfish's JSP2.1 implementation

I’ve been looking at Glassfish quite a bit lately, and liking what I see.
In particular, I’ve been looking closely at the JSP 2.1 implementation. It appears to be robust and well-tested.

My interest was prompted by the number of bug reports we were getting on the Jetty mailing lists about the JSP 2.1 implementation we were using, which was Jasper from Apache. For whatever reason, there seems to be little activity on this particular project.

Glassfish, however, has an active community of developers who were welcoming of my initial enquiries about using it in Jetty and who have been very open to collaboration.

It’s worth noting that Glassfish’s jsp implementation is based on that from Apache, and that some of the key developers of previous Apache Jasper versions are now working mainly on Glassfish.

I was able to relatively quickly get a build of Jetty going using Glassfish’s Jasper. Initial testing has been very positive, so much so that we now use it exclusively as Jetty’s JSP 2.1 implementation.

So far, this is available only in SVN head (checkout revision 782), however, we plan to do an rc1 release in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Jan Luehe from Glassfish for all the help with the integration, who I believe has blogged
about the integration too.