Running my Java web app with Jetty/Servlets on my personal website?

Question

I have a web app that uses Jetty/Servlets and SQL, and would like to host it on my personal domain name. I'm not sure where to start.

To host it on my domain, do I need a server that can run Java? Is it possible to run it locally on my machine and forward everything to my server so that anyone can access it? What's the simplest, most straightforward way to do this?

Answer 1

Yes, you'll need a computer on which you can install and run a Java implementation.

For the computer, you buy or rent a real or virtual machine such as a Mac running macOS or PC running BSD, Linux, Microsoft Windows, or such.

For example, Digital Ocean rents virtual computers running FreeBSD or any of several flavors of Linux, on which you can install your Java software. As another example, you can purchase a Mac mini and ship it to a “colo” company to operate on a very fast internet connection with backup power in a physically secure environment.

The Java implementation can be obtained from any of several vendors, for free or for a fee. Vendors include, off the top of my head, Azul Systems, BellSoft, Microsoft, Red Hat/IBM, SAP, Oracle, Amazon, Pivotal, and Adoptium.

You must also obtain and run an app server capable of being a Jakarta Servlet container. You have a choice of several, including Apache Tomcat, Eclipse Jetty, Apache TomEE, Payara, Glassfish, WildFly, JBoss, OpenLiberty, and others.

As for a SQL relational database, you can install your own database server such as Postgres, or you can rent a managed database server. Several companies offer database as a service, with instances of Postgres, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, etc. For simpler smaller-scale data needs, running H2 Database Engine alongside your Servlet container might be appropriate, as it is written in pure Java.