| I love java, and especially modern java, but I also love Ruby and python and the majority of my web dev has been in Rails. I'm now working on a Java side project, and while typically in the past I've just done the backend in java and then used rails for the web UI and had them share a DB, I'm trying to see if I can use Java for the web part without going insane. Part of the problem is that historically the big players in java web are HUGE enterprises that was to be able to have 50 teams all do a small part of a backend in parallel and then just deploy them all together. Thus was born the servlet API and application servers. But there's so many assumptions and bizarre requirements that come out of trying to do this perverse form of engineering that the whole thing ends up nigh unusable for someone who could otherwise just "rails g" 85% of their project. Jetty has always struck me as a bit of a middle man where if you want, you can do the servlet thing but it's also a production grade application framework that doesn't force you to do the java EE dance if you don't want to. Though there is some leakage. But it's a lot less magical than Spring and is also just the http server bits, not the rest of the db and view and etc. But since virtual threads are pretty stable now, I really want to use them, and jetty is the first reasonably complete and robust option that seems to have included support for them. So - you know how these things go. I'm currently writing an HTTP url path router that supports the rails syntax from routes.rb. And then I'm going to write a Handler implementation that wrangles all the database stuff and does convenient/terse parsing of params (like how rails folds path params, url params, and form params into a single params object) and rendering of responses (so I can render a json object without having to call Content.Sink.[...] and use gson all over the place. It's meant to all be very non magical and you can step through the code in a debugger and not see a billion reflective invocations of methods. And I'm hoping I can make the API of my Handler convenient enough that you don't regret that it's not annotation magic-based. Also - I know there are various attempts at easier/less annoying Java web things like vertx and such, but they a) don't support virtual threads yet, and b) many of them are small enough im worried they'll rot eventually. Jetty meanwhile isn't going anywhere. |
Vertx is arguably larger than Jetty or at least NOT smaller. Vertx is used by Quarkus and other Redhat/IBM projects e.g. if you use the newer Keycloak you're using Vertx. It's been around for a long time and has received constant updates.
Vertx is also 1 of the top performs of Techempower Benchmarks keeping Java in the race for those that care.