[le-mark]

I can never seem to understand what it offers that java.nio does not on a fundamental plumbing level (for sure, Jetty provides a lot of convenience classes on top of that plumbing)

Creating a minimalist server is an interesting excercise, everyone should do it to see how it's done imo. BUT it's the stuff like parsing http headers, query parameters, and request bodies (formencoded, chunked files?) that make a solution like Jetty worth while. Again, writing an http parser is a valuable learning experience, but your boss really doesn't want you spending time on it, OR paying to support it going forward.

As an aside, it used to be a thing in the late 90's early 2000's for every application out there to have it's own "XYZ Transport Protocol" ie XYZTP, and it really, really sucked.

[saurik]

And it isn't like this stuff is exactly trivial: with content transfer encodings, trailers, and exotic stuff like Expect: 100-continue, no one ever does this stuff correctly when they think they can just throw it together :/.

[norswap]

Makes sense. I guess I was a bit biased because I saw it used in projects that didn't need HTTP at all (can't unfortunately remember them).