Jetty, SPDY and HAProxy

The SPDY protocol will be the next web revolution.
The HTTP-bis working group has been rechartered to use SPDY as the basis for HTTP 2.0, so network and server vendors are starting to update their offerings to include SPDY support.
Jetty has a long story of staying cutting edge when it is about web features and network protocols.

• Jetty first implemented web continuations (2005) as a portable library, deployed them successfully for years to customers, until web continuations eventually become part of the Servlet 3.0 standard.

• Jetty first supported the WebSocket protocol within the Servlet model (2009), deployed it successfully for years to customers, and now the WebSocket APIs are in the course of becoming a standard via JSR 356.

Jetty is the first and today practically the only Java server that offers complete SPDY support, with advanced features that we demonstrated at JavaOne (watch the demo if you’re not convinced).
If you have not switched to Jetty yet, you are missing the revolutions that are happening on the web, you are probably going to lose technical ground to your competitors, and lose money upgrading too late when it will cost (or already costs) you a lot more.
Jetty is open source, released with friendly licenses, and with full commercial support in case you need our expertise about developer advice, training, tuning, configuring and using Jetty.
While SPDY is now well supported by browsers and its support is increasing in servers, it is still lagging a bit behind in intermediaries such as load balancers, proxies and firewalls.
To exploit the full power of SPDY, you want not only SPDY in the communication between the browser and the load balancer, but also between the load balancer and the servers.
We are actively opening discussion channels with the providers of such products, and one of them is HAProxy. With the collaboration of Willy Tarreau, HAProxy mindmaster, we have recently been able to perform a full SPDY communication between a SPDY client (we tested latest Chrome, latest Firefox and Jetty’s Java SPDY client) through HAProxy to a Jetty SPDY server.
This sets a new milestone in the adoption of the SPDY protocol because now large deployments can leverage the goodness of HAProxy as load balancer *and* leverage the goodness of SPDY as well as provided by Jetty SPDY servers.
The HAProxy SPDY features are available in the latest development snapshots of HAProxy. A few details will probably be subject to changes (in particular the HAProxy configuration keywords), but SPDY support in HAProxy is there.
The Jetty SPDY features are already available in Jetty 7, 8 and 9.
If you are interested in knowing how you can use SPDY in your deployments, don’t hesitate to contact us. Most likely, you will be contacting us using the SPDY protocol from your browser to our server 🙂