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Adding Jetty 6 to Eclipse as a server runtime and overcoming the NullPointerException on Launch

I love Jetty. It is small, it is very fast and once you use it you start pondering why you use Tomcat. The reason in most cases is that you know Tomcat and it is relatively very well documented. Jetty is not as well documented but well worth the effort. One thing that Tomcat has and Jetty does not is built-in support in Eclipse as a server runtime.

The beauty of server runtimes is that you can easily deploy and update-on-the-fly web applications to the server. So if you modify a class in an web application, it is automatically updated – possibly restarting the server for you.

The makers of Jetty try to fill in this gap with their server runtime – which can be easily installed if you follow the instructions. Still, when trying to launch my web application on the new Jetty runtime, I kept getting an obnoxious, trace-free NullPointerException. As a user of Eclipse 3.3.2 Europa with little time to upgrade to Ganymede, I repeatedly tried to upgrade the WTP from my version 2.0.2 to whatever is current. That fails, in classic Eclipse fashion, because it is all geared at the *current* version of Eclipse (3.4).

What ended up working for me was to download the 2.0.2 patches from the WTP site. I extracted the files from the zip file to a directory. I then installed them using the update manager as a local site. To do that:

  1. Open the update manager: Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install
  2. Choose ‘Search for new features to install’ and click ‘Next’
  3. Click ‘New Local Site’
  4. In the window that will open, point at the location that you extracted the zip file to, and in there, the ‘eclipse’ folder
  5. Click Finish

Eclipse will automatically install the patches, potentially restarting itself to have them take effect. This should cure the NullPointerException on launch for Jetty, and actually for several other servers that suffered from it in version 2.0.2 of the WTP in Eclipse 3.3.

NOTE:
If this does not work, also make sure that Eclipse is using the JDK’s JRE and NOT a generic Java JRE. A servlet container like Jetty must be able to compile files on the fly and therefore needs the JDK beyond the JRE.

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Java Television Web Development WebSphere

Deploying a web application to Jetty

The Jetty web application server is great. It is just not very well document and when it is documented it is aimed for the very uninitiated. If you’re using Jetty, it is almost like an old boys club – ‘you made it’.

Still, it appears that Jetty and Tomcat are becoming much more similar in their way of doing things, with both using a somewhat proprietary, if you can say that on an open source project, configuration schemes. So how do you deploy a web application to Jetty?

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Java

Working with Jetty

For my thesis, I am going to use the Jetty lightweight web server and as such am going to need a lot of trying and learning around how to use it, as it is more ’embedded’, for lack of a better word, than Tomcat. For me, Tomcat is a relatively known entity, having worked with in one form or another since 2000.

I am using Jetty 6.1.7,

So here goes…

Lesson #1: Setting Jetty’s default Port

  1. Open the file jetty.xml under the /etc folder inside the Jetty installation directory.
  2. Inside of the element with the name "addConnector", look for the element 
    <Set name="port"><SystemProperty name="jetty.port" default="8999"/></Set>

  3. Change the value of the default attribute to the port you want to use.

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