2025/12/09 - Jetty at 30: Staying relevant with Open Source driven innovation
How does a web server born in the era of dial-up internet remain relevant in the age of HTTP/3 and cloud apps? Eclipse Jetty is an open source Java web server created in 1995 that has sustained its developers and served clients from startups to global tech giants.
Not only has Jetty needed to adopt to and/or drive new standards (Servlets, EE, Push, HTTP/2, websockets, reactive, HTTP/3), but it has done so whilst evolving from when a hundred request per minute was consider high load, to now when a millions requests per second are possible. All done whilst staying true to a lightweight, embeddable flexible design that developers love and being accommodating to those users that wish to evolve beyond the standards.
The web has transformed dramatically since the mid-’90s, and Jetty evolved with it. This talk tells the story of Jetty’s technical adaptability, highlighting how an open source project kept innovating to avoid obsolescence. We’ll explore Jetty’s major technology pivots and the design principles that kept it relevant as the industry moved from monolithic servers to microservices, and from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/3. A HTTP server should long ago have become a commodity with little incremental value, yet innovation has been able to keep the project relevant to businesses that wish to drive the evolution of the web.
This talk will reveal how Open Source collaborations have enabled Jetty to thrive for three decades in a fast-changing landscape. Attendees will walk away with an appreciation for the engineering ethos that kept Jetty relevant for 30 years. You’ll learn how community feedback and constant re-invention fueled Jetty’s longevity and gain insights into sustaining technical excellence in your own projects over the long haul. This journey through Jetty’s evolution showcases not just a timeline of features, but the mindset required to keep software alive and well across generations of technology.
Par Greg Wilkins