Maven中Jetty插件的企业用途是什么？

Question

Since I learn from some maven tutorials we can import Jetty as a maven plugin like this.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>6.1.10</version>
  <configuration>
    <scanIntervalSeconds>5</scanIntervalSeconds>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

And can run the plugin like this.

$ mvn jetty:run

Also we can change the port and context path and lots of stuff in this plugin.
As I understood that we can use Jetty as a server like tomcat, and we can deploy an application through it.

But the thing I don't understand is what is the actual enterprise use of Jetty in maven. .

Answer 1

From the official documentation :

The Jetty Maven plugin is useful for rapid development and testing. You can add it to any webapp project that is structured according to the Maven defaults. The plugin can then periodically scan your project for changes and automatically redeploy the webapp if any are found. This makes the development cycle more productive by eliminating the build and deploy steps: you use your IDE to make changes to the project, and the running web container automatically picks them up, allowing you to test them straight away.

However (and maybe this addresses what you call "enterprise use"):

While the Jetty Maven Plugin can be very useful for development we do not recommend its use in a production capacity. In order for the plugin to work it needs to leverage many internal Maven apis and Maven itself it not a production deployment tool. We recommend either the traditional distribution deployment approach or using embedded Jetty.

Answer 2

I don't know exactly what you mean by enterprise use , but let's say you're developing a web application and it's a Maven project.

Each time you want to test whether the web application works correctly, you need to deploy the web archive (WAR) on a web server, eg Jetty or Tomcat. Usually this involves a couple of manual steps like:

1. Start the web server
2. Deploy the WAR on it

Where the Maven plugin comes in handy is that it allows you to just execute

mvn jetty:run-war

and it does all these steps automatically for you in a single command, saving you lots of time. The plugin is even able to redeploy the application once it notices changes have been made.

Answer 3

The main usage is for testing, Jetty can also be started programmatically (see this example Java code) which means you can start server directly from your code and interact with your REST API for instance.

You can also use it for easier deployment of small applications, just package everything into the JAR which runs server from main method when executed via java -jar your-app.jar . You don't need any dependencies installed except Java then.

As a side note, I currently work in Clojure (JVM language based on Lisp) and many people deploys their application as JAR which internally runs embedded Jetty because this way it's also starts REPL which you can connect to remotely and debug your application when it's running.