SPDY protocol now available in Jetty

The Jetty web server and servlet container has become the first mainstream Java-based server to support Google's SPDY protocol – the developers have announced that it has been added to the newly released 7.6.2 and 8.1.2 versions of Jetty. SPDY is designed to speed up the web by reducing the number of round trips a client has to make, squeezing HTTP's verboseness and compressing and multiplexing requests into one single TCP connection. It can make a web page download faster by up to a factor of three and also improves security by always using TLS (Transport Layer Security).

The SPDY support in Jetty includes both a client and server implementation of SPDY and works in combination with a new Jetty module, NPN, which implements Next Protocol Negotiation TLS Extension. Although NPN is hosted by the Jetty project, it is independent of the Jetty application and can be used by other Java network servers; both the SPDY and NPN modules are pure Java implementations.

Webtide's Jetty developers have deployed SPDY support on www.webtide.com; browsing the site with Chrome or with Firefox 11 (after setting network.http.spdy.enabled in about:config to true) will transparently use SPDY. The Jetty project is hosted by Eclipse and the code is dual-licensed under Apache and Eclipse. Jetty can be downloaded from the Eclipse site.

(djwm)