As avid users of jetty are bound to have caught wind of, jetty7 is in the process of migrating to the Eclipse Foundation as a component of the Eclipse Runtime. We even already have our own happy little news group which we need to get into the habit of checking and using more. The milestone in the process we have in sight right now is the next Creation Review date which is March 11, 2009. We are ironing out the requirements for a successful review and all indications are positive on that note. Oh, and one of the requirements that we have two mentors that are on the Architectural Council, the first already being Jeff McAffer of EclipseSource fame and the most recent being Bjorn Freeman-Benson of the Eclipse Foundation itself. Couldn’t be happier having them on board for this process, makes life ever so much more straight forward.
Regardless, once we have the source in its new home we’ll have to adjust to some new processes and work out some sort of arrangement for managing jetty7 and jetty6 across two svn repositories and two bug tracking systems. It shouldn’t be terrible as we are planning on slowing feature additions to jetty6 and get it into a more methodical maintenance release schedule. Of particular interest is how we are going to manage snapshot development for jetty7 as eclipse doesn’t have the infrastructure for that maven setup, at least as far as I have seen. Could be we make use of Nexus at oss.sonatype.com for that as it has been quite useful for dojo and cometd as of late.
A big thing that I think is important to note over and over again is that Jetty will be dual licensed once it goes into the Eclipse Foundation, taking on both the EPL and the ASL as options for use. So no bait and switch tactics or anything like that going on here, it is only adding an additional option to the mix.
It is probably also good to note that we have started the IP review process up for the lion share of jetty that will be going to eclipse. In preparation for that we recently shifted around the basic structure of jetty in svn trunk to a new flatter structure that is more typical of maven projects. We also started factoring out some of the larger jetty artifacts, creating jetty-io and jetty-http artifacts that allow us to clean up the dependency tree a little bit since we added in the asynchronous jetty-client a while back.
Not all jetty artifacts of old will be going to the Eclipse Foundation. A lot of the third party integrations and things like that will be remaining at The Codehaus and will be packaged into another form of jetty distribution…likely something similar to the existing Hightide release which rolls together jetty integrations into an easy download bundle. A lot of those details will be worked out shortly after we get jetty into eclipse svn and the jetty7 development environment stabilizes some. We are still targeting to get our first jetty7 release out along with the release of the servlet-api 3.0 release sometime around JavaOne. Obviously we have a lot of details to iron out with jetty7’s new home and how it integrates with the packages remaining at The Codehaus. One thing that will not change is jetty releases being in the central maven repository. Jetty7 will be available in the central repository, simply under different coordinates.
Amoung the other issues we have to work out is JSP. While it is not critical for the initial import of jetty into eclipse, eventually we are going to need to offer jsp support from jetty in the osgi bundles that we are going to produce. Sadly there is currently no ‘perfect’ solution for this that I at least know of. Currently in jetty we are checking out the glassfish jsp api and implementation, applying some patches and fixed it up to work with the jetty logging mechanics and then releasing those artifacts in the org.mortbay.jetty:jsp-api-2.1-glassfish coordinates. To do that under the eclipse umbrella we would have get the glassfish jsp source run through the eclipse IP verification process, which is not a task I particularly relish at the moment. Perhaps in a month or two I won’t be quite as leery of the idea, but for now that is an issue we are firmly passing on until we have the host of other process related issues resolved.
Anyway, once any or all of these details clear up we’ll make sure people know via the mailing lists, blogs and of course our handy dandy shiny eclipse.jetty newsgroup.
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