Comments on: Executable WARs with Jetty

By: Leonard Axelsson

Leonard Axelsson — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:39:23 +0000

Thanks for the tip, probably saved me a lot of time

Used your example as the base for a gradle script that takes a war and “jettyfies” it. Might be interesting to someone: http://bit.ly/standalone-war

By: Fernnado

Fernnado — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:06:52 +0000

Maybe you should get this into the maven-jetty-plugin, as an option to publish an executable war file

By: Manuel Woelker

Manuel Woelker — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:45:57 +0000

Good call, Tim. Fixed now. To be honest nowadays I don’t import anything, I just Ctrl-Shift-O it.

By: Tim Perrett

Tim Perrett — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:04:11 +0000

Hey Manuel,

This is great stuff – although, you really need to include the import statements in your code snippet so people know where those classes are coming from as its not clear.

By: Manuel Woelker

Manuel Woelker — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:09:45 +0000

Joel, your MANIFEST.MF is probably okay, but I don’t think plain Java supports jars-in-jars (or jars-in-wars in this case). I simply have the jetty classes right along side everything else in the war. So the top level in the war looks like this:

META-INF/
WEB-INF/
org/
javax/
Start.class

The manifest is in META-INF, the web-app itself in WEB-INF, Jetty resides in org/mortbay/jetty, the servlet API is under javax/servlet and the Start.class is referenced in the manifest. I used Jetty 6.1.17 [1], unpacked all the jars from the lib directory and then added both the org and the javax directories to the war, followed by Start.class and the META-INF/ folder with the manifest.

Hope that helps, good luck.

[1] http://dist.codehaus.org/jetty/jetty-6.1.17/jetty-6.1.17.zip

By: Joel

Joel — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:46:18 +0000

Thx for the info, I was looking to do the same thing. But i can’t make it runnable like hudson. When executing my war with “java -jar myWar.war”, I always get the following exception : Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/mortbay/jetty/Connector

Could you tell me how you configured the manifest file so it worked?

Currently, i setted my “Main” class in the root of the jar, just like hudson and configured the manifest to use it. But jetty’s jar is in WEB-INF\lib\ unlike winstone in hudson that is in the root.

I tried to set an explicit classpath in the manifest without any success.

If you could provide the layout of your packaged WAR with the manifest you are using, it would really be appreciated.

By: Manuel Woelker

Manuel Woelker — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:58:57 +0000

So it was right under my nose all along.

I tried mashing up the demo war and Jetty and I can report that it works flawlessly. It adds about 3MB to the file size, so not too bad. Might be worth considering for small demos and such.

By: Benjamin Muskalla

Benjamin Muskalla — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:37:39 +0000

Manuel, there is a WAR containing all the regular rap demos apps.

By: Manuel Woelker

Manuel Woelker — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:17:59 +0000

@Benny: Haven't tried it yet, mostly because I couldn't find a premade war, and I didn't want to go through the hassle of creating one myself. If you could provide me with a hello-world RAP WAR (or point me to one) I'd be happy to try that out. @sud: glassfish might be option too. Jetty is still fairly light-weight. I don't know any specifics but it would seem as if the overhead for glassfish would be a lot bigger (the glassfish installer weighs in at around 50 MB). There is an embedded glassfish project for that purpose, but the JAR still weighs in at around 17MB. So depending on your definition of lightweight this may not be an option.

By: sud

sud — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:53:03 +0000

This is interesting. I’m curious to see what the same code would like for embedded glassfish. I remember seeing it somewhere and it may have been even simpler.