[bborud]

It depends what you want to focus on: build a web server or a simple REST framework.

About a decade ago I worked on the query processor component for the Yahoo Vespa platform and I spent a month writing a web server to squeeze as much performance out of the JVM as possible. And indeed it was quite a bit faster than Jetty. Speed being a bit significant when you have a stringent latency budget.

However, I ended up deciding it wasn't really worth it. The extra millisecond or so consumed by Jetty wasn't worth the cost of having to maintain a relatively complete implementation of HTTP. So I took out my implementation and put Jetty back in.