Jetty Road Map  

Stable Series: Jetty 4.2.x

The plan for the stable series will continue maintenance tasks while focusing on integration and extensions such as: The build environment needs to be updated to better support the variosu integration modules.

Development Series: Jetty 5.0.x

The servlet spec 2.4 development series will start Q2 2003. The 2.4 spec is pretty incremental on the 2.3 spec, so this will be an evolution rather than revolution. Much of the infrastructure needed is already in 4.2.x

Experimental Series: Jetty 6.0

Jetty 6.0 development has started already. This is focused on the development of brand new HTTP stack that is designed as blocking-agnostic plus includes a significant portability layer. The intent is to get a HTTP stack that can run on everything from single threaded palm pilot running waba to the latest gun JVM with non-blocking io on a SMP engine.

To support non blocking IO, the HttpHandler API will be significantly redesigned. Non-servlet programmers will want to look at this API and it will be available Q4 2003.

Only once the HTTP stack is stable and tested, will servlets be considered for Jetty6. As servlets are blocking by design, there is not a lot they can gain from Jetty5 (other than speed and instability :-). Jetty 6 will not be considered for the stable series until at least late 2004.

Jetty History

You can't appreciate where you are going unless you understand where you have been. So here is jetty's history in a nutshell:
November 2002. Jetty 4.2.0 released with even greater performance. The buffering and thread pooling were completely reworked.
September 2002. Jetty 4.1.0 released with greater performance and improved apache integration.
June 2002. Jetty 4.1.x development series starts, focused on improved performance and greater simplicity. Also increase support for apache integration.
March 2002. Jetty 4.0.0 release, supporting 2.3 servlet spec and optional JDK 1.4 features. This release has focused on 2.3 features while retaining Jetty's performance.
October 2001. Jetty 4 development starts to support the 2.3 servlet specification.
September 2001. Jetty 3.1.0 released a change to the org.mortbay package names, many performance improvements and a small restructure to support JMX management.
January 2001. Stability releases of Jetty 3 with increased performance.
October 2000. Jetty 3 released for Java 1.2, Servlet 2.2 and the HTTP/1.1. Passes Jakarta/watchdog servlet tests. The code base has been significantly trimmed and refined from Jetty2.
December 1999. Jetty 3 development started for Java 1.2, Servlet 2.2 and the latest HTTP/1.1 RFC.
July 1999. Jetty 2.2.0 improved configuration and dynamic servlets. Many improvements and bug fixes contributed from the Open Source community.
January 1999. Jetty 2.1.0 upgraded to JSDK 2.1 API.
October 1998. Jetty 2.0.1 released as Open Source
October 1998. Jetty 2.0 released with HTTP/1.1 support.
December 1997. Jetty development finally progressed to a Release 1.0 stage. The package hierarchy was moved to a org.mortbay structure and merged with the other software packages of Mort Bay Consulting. The JSDK versions of the javax.servlets were included in the release in accordance with JavaSoft licensing requirements.
February 1997. All involved agreed that MBServler was a terrible name, so many weeks of effort were put in to remove all references to that name. In the process the HttpHandler architecture was developed and support for the beta1.0 javax.servlet API added. Jetty was picked as the new name because:
  • it started with a J
  • there is a little jetty in the Mort Bay Logo.
  • jetty:// kind of looks like http://
  • you can pronounce j-80 or j-'eighty' as in port 80, the HTTP port.
December 1996. The HTML generation package was used re-implemented and documented. Release V4.5B of MBServler and IssueTracker were made available.
May 1996. Mort Bay entered a partnership with Intelligent Switched Systems to develop telephony and WWW based authenticated service platforms. MBServler is used extensively in those platforms and was incrementally improved by the process.
March 1996. Mort Bay Consulting Pty. Ltd. took over the server and tracking application. The server was renamed MBServler (a Servlet Serving Server) and ported to the then release alpha javax.servlet API.
December 1995. Greg Wilkins wrote a HTTP Server and WWW defect tracking application as an entry to the Sun Microsystems Australia Java programming contest. Greg's entry won the contest. This pre-dated Javasoft's announcement of Jeeves and the javax.servlet API, so the server defined its own API.