Guys,
I tried to figure out why the platform
moved to Jetty. I sent out an email and it ended up with Jeff McAffer who
was kind enough to send along this email. We can discuss further at next
weeks meeting.
Scott
From: Jeff McAffer
[mailto:Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007
10:55 PM
To: scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: DJ Houghton
Subject: Fw: Eclipse On Jetty
Scott,
DJ
forwarded this to me. Basically the Jetty move was the result of several
disjoint steps. The first was the desire to have a real, fully
functioning implemention of the OSGi HTTP service. In Equinox we have had
an HTTP service implementation for a while but it has had various issues from
functional completeness and currency to performance. After looking
around, Jetty was identified as the best candidate for *embedding in Eclipse*. It
is small, fast, easily embeddable and there happened to be someone who was
volunteering to do that work. To date we have not seen any viable
embedded Tomcat (or other reasonable open source server) scenarios implemented.
So with that we had a working, in-framework HTTP service as part of the
various things that Equinox provides.
The
second step was the Help team's long standing need to move off the Tomcat they
were providing. There were serveral reasons.
-
Their version of Tomcat was old.
-
People were pressuring us to expose the Tomcat as API. that is, people
wanted to use the Tomcat supplied by us for their own purposes when in fact it
was an internal implmentation detail of the Help system
-
Add 1 + 2 and you get people wanting the Help team to stay current on Tomcat. They
are in the Help business no the app server business
-
Tomcat is relatively large and heavy for what they need
An
HTTP Service implemenation (any one that supported JSPs etc) supplied by
another party (anyone trustworhty) represented a solution to these issues. Jetty
was one such implementation that, from their point of view, is available,
supported, addressed their requirement and, in the end, is not their problem. So,
with the full blessing and support of the Eclipse PMC, they moved to Jetty. Note
that we are getting pressure to update the version of Jetty :-)
Anyway,
with the Help move, there is no need for the Eclipse project to continue
managing or shipping Tomcat. For us it was never API. Following
the precedence set by the Xerces-situation of the past, we plan to stop
shipping that which is no longer required by us. The curent Tomcat (i.e.,
the old one we have been shipping) can continue to be made available for
projects that need it (it can live in Orbit indefinitely) but we have no plans
to update the version or do any other work on that front.
As
for the puzzle, I hope this helps somewhat. I know that there are bugs in
the Equinox world talking about using Jetty for an HTTP service. There
are also bugs related to moving Help onto Jetty. And there is the bug you
see for removing Tomcat. This matches my picture of how this has come
about.
Let
me know if you have further questions.
Jeff
----- Forwarded by DJ Houghton/Ottawa/IBM
on 09/24/2007 04:52 PM -----
|
"Scott Rosenbaum"
<scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
09/24/2007 04:01 PM
|
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To
|
DJ Houghton/Ottawa/IBM@IBMCA
|
|
cc
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|
|
Subject
|
Eclipse On Jetty
|
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DJ,
I am
on the BIRT PMC. I have been looking at Buzilla 173692 which
concerns getting Eclipse to run on Jetty. As you probably know, we (BIRT)
put a slow down on this bug to remove Tomcat, since we are dependent on Tomcat.
For the Ganymede release, we would like to rectify this situation and we
are currently evaluating our options. As I review the Bugzilla entry the
one piece of the puzzle that I am missing is the to move to Jetty in the first
place.
I had
a look in Bugzilla. I can find references to the move to Jetty, but never
the rationale for the move.
I was
wondering if you had any insight into why the Platform decided to use Jetty
instead of Tomcat?
As we
evaluate our options, the PMC continues to lead towards using Tomcat as the
default web server based on its install base etc.
Do you
have any thoughts on this?
Scott
Rosenbaum
BIRT
PMC
