Jetty 7 arrives from Eclipse and Webtide

The Jetty developers have released version 7 of their popular Java Servlet container. The source code for the new release is available from the Eclipse Foundation under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL); Jetty 6 continues to be available from the Codehaus project under the Apache 2 license. Jetty 7 is the first major release of Jetty from the Eclipse Foundation since the project moved under the Eclipse umbrella.

Jetty 7 code focuses on a repackaged version of Jetty 6.x functionality; because of delays in the Servlet 3.0 specification, it implements version 2.5 of the Servlet API, though a number of functions from the future Servlet specification are included. Jetty 7 supports continuations to enable asynchronous communication for Jetty 6 and 7 and Servlet 3.0. In addition, the developers have improved integration of the OSGi component technology, added a modular start.jar mechanism and increased overall performance.

Published by Webtide, Hightide is a second Jetty distribution that the developers describe as "is to Jetty as Ubuntu is to Linux." Hightide is based on Jetty 7 but contains, as additional components, the JSP (JavaServer Pages) implementation of the GlassFish Application Server, the Java Transaction API (JTA) from Atomikos, a Maven plug-in, Ant integration, and Spring configuration. Webtide, the main firm behind the development of Jetty, was recently taken over by BPM specialist Intalio.

According to the Jetty 7.0.0 release announcement, version 8 of Jetty will go into "pre-release in the next few months" and will support the Servlet 3.0 API. Jetty 6 will continue to be supported for some time, but new features will no longer be added to that version.

(crve)