This blog updates the roadmap for jetty-6, jetty-7 and jetty-8 with the
latest plans resulting from the move to the Eclipse Foundation and the
delay in the servlet-3.0 specification. Previously it was intended that jetty-7 was going to be servlet-3.0, but with the move to eclipse and with the delay of JSR-315, it was decided to delay servlet 3.0 to Jetty-8 later in this year. Thus the current active branches of jetty are:
Jetty-6 @ codehaus & mortbay
The current stable branch is jetty-6 for servlet-2.5 and java-1.4 (some modules are 1.5). It is in the org.mortbay.* package space and is licensed under the apache 2.0 license. However, it is now mostly in maintenance mode and new features will not be added to jetty-6 unless there is compelling reasons to do so. It includes support for both HTTP server and client and comes bundled with a cometd server.
Jetty-6 is the release for established, production-ready projects.
Jetty-7 @ eclipse
The current development branch is jetty-7 for servlet-2.5 and java-1.5. It is in the org.eclipse.jetty.* package space and is licensed under both the apache 2.0 and eclipse 1.0 licenses and may be distributed under the terms of either license. Jetty-7 represents a moderate refactor of the jetty code base:
- Moved to the org.eclipse.jetty packages
- Remodularized so that dependencies for client, server and servlet container are more separable
- Updated architecture to anticipate the needs of servlet-3.0
- Support for some servlet-3.0 features, including
- asynchronous servlets (updated continuations)
- web-fragment.xml
- META-INF/resource static content in jars
- Improved OSGi integration and availability of OSGi bundles as well as maven artefacts
The intent of jetty-7 is to allow users to transition to the updated architecture and to access some servlet-3.0 features, within a servlet 2.5 container and without the need to update java 1.6 or to wait for the final specification later this year. There are milestone builds of jetty-7 available already and we hope to have an official eclipse release in the next month or two.
The cometd client and server are now in the cometd.org project and are built against jetty-7. Some jetty integrations (eg jetty-maven-plugin, terracotta,
wadi, etc) and distributions (eg. deb, rpm, hightide) will remain at
codehaus and are now built from codehaus trunk.
Jetty-7 is the release for projects starting development now.
Jetty-8 @ eclipse
The current experimental branch is jetty-8 for servlet-3.0 and java-1.6. It is in the org.eclipse.jetty.* package space and is licensed under both the apache 2.0 and eclipse 1.0 licenses and may be distributed under the terms of either license. Jetty-8 is being kept in lock-step with jetty-7 as much as possible, so that it represents essentially the same server, but rebuilt with java-1.6 and using the standard servlet-3.0 to access the features already available in jetty-7.
Jetty-8 is the branch for people who wish to experiment with the emerging APIs now.
Webtide @ JavaOne
If you want more information about what exactly are these jetty and servlet-3.0 features, why not come to JavaOne 2009?! Webtide will be have a small booth in the expo (where you will mostly find me) and Sun have invited me to participate in their technical
session on Servlet 3.0 at JavaOne, together with Rajiv Mordani and Jan
Leuhe. I’ll be presenting a section on the Asynchronous Servlets API
and giving a demonstration that uses some ease-of-deployment features
to deploy a webapp on glassfish using the Jetty asynchronous HTTP
client in a 3.0 asynchronous servlet. The session is 
TS-3790 “Java
10 Comments
James Stansell · 26/05/2009 at 17:51
Hi Greg,
Thanks for the info!
One question. You wrote “jetty-8 for servlet-3.0 and java-1.5” but based on the rest of the text it sounds like jetty-8 is for java-1.6. Is that right?
Regards,
-james.
Greg Wilkins · 27/05/2009 at 01:48
James – oops! fixed. Thanks!
Anatoli · 01/06/2009 at 12:27
Hi Greg!
Any plans for Jetty to be available on J2ME CLDC? If not in your plans, how possible do you see this adaptation? How far is i-Jetty from this?
Thanks in advance,
Anatoli
florin · 02/06/2009 at 04:10
In my entire experience with the web, since ’97, I have never come across a website that does so horrible at handling their documentation.
Jetty guys, you are awful. Absolutely awful. Now that you got yourself on eclipse, will you please wipe out all documentation in all other places and please just keep it in one place and better organized.
Awful, awful, awful. The most frustrating experience with any product on the web. Ever.
Greg Wilkins · 02/06/2009 at 06:15
Florin,
I think we actually have some very good documentation…. it’s just that our organization of it is – as you say – somewhat awful.
We are working to address this and have hired a tech writer to help structure and index the sites. You can see the initial results of that in our website indexes.
We will soon be addressing the wiki structure, but are being held back a bit by the differences between confluence and wikipedia.
But please remember, this is open source and you are free to contribute to the documentation as much as the software. The fact that we have a business built around developing jetty does not give us a monopoly over those that have developed businesses using Jetty.
Greg Wilkins · 02/06/2009 at 06:19
Anatoli,
we have been working with j2me recently and have some POC ports of recent Jetty-7. However, we are not yet sure if it is worthwhile finishing this work and publishing it. The past ports to J2ME have all failed to attract sufficient community or clients to keep them maintained.
So if you have interest, please email me with details and we can build a case for why we should invest in supporting j2me.
florin · 02/06/2009 at 15:51
Greg,
I’m using jetty and happy with it. Give me something to do and I’ll find some time to help out.
Thank you for the hard work on building jetty. That is very much appreciated.
Preston L. Bannister · 13/05/2010 at 00:53
You folk are all over the place. 🙂
I rather like that the future of Jetty is strongly associated with Eclipse, but…
In the meantime it seems the Jetty 6 stuff at codehaus.org should still be usable. What I found was errors in non-editable wiki pages, no means of adding comments, and no obvious feedback path.
This cannot(!) be good for someone starting out with Jetty 6.
tester · 11/05/2011 at 23:47
As Jetty 8 is not yet stable release, and we plan to upgrade to JAVA SE 6, Will Jetty 7 work with JAVA SE 6? what are the implications? when is stable Jetty 8 to be released?
thank you.
cheers
gregw · 12/05/2011 at 00:02
Jetty 7 works fine with JavaSE 6
Jetty 8 is not “stable” mostly for administrative reasons at eclipse – getting IP clearance etc. The M3 release coming out shortly is pretty much the same as Jetty-7 internally.
Comments are closed.