While at EclipseCon this year, I had the chance to talk with Greg Wilkins and Adam Lieber of Webtide. Just the night before they’d checked code into the Eclipse Foundation repositories to finish up adding Jetty as an Eclipse project. We start out discussing Jetty’s new Eclipse home.
I then ask if Jetty is still a small, embedded web server. While it sounds like it’s grown up since the days long ago when I used, as they say, adding it to Eclipse has given them the option to re-slim down and componentize Jetty even more.
We then talk about different scenarios Jetty can be, and is, used in, esp. as a component for application servers and surprisingly in Android and Windows Mobile phones. The phone use-case in intriguing so I ask them for some examples of how it might be used.
Next up, I ask them why they choose to dock themselves in Eclipse. Along with this, we talk about the way Jetty is being run in Eclipse as components and how that relates to them being assembled in the existing CodeHaus repository.
To close out, pulling up the to Eclipse in general, I ask them how Jetty will fit into the general Eclipse Runtime projects and vision.
As a post-script, not too long after we recorded this video, the Webtide folks discovered that Google AppEngine is using Jetty to aid in Java support.
Disclosure: The Eclipse Foundation is a client, sponsored this video, and paid T&E to EclipseCon.
Jetty is awesome. We made it the default for OpenNMS about two years ago (although Tomcat support is still maintained), so it's not just for small projects.