Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Well this is killer (via Sam Ruby):

The 6.0.0alpha3 release of Jetty is now available and provides a 2.4 servlet server in 400k jar, with only 140k of dependencies (2.6M more if you want JSP!!!). But as well as being small, fast, clean and sexy, Jetty 6 supports a new feature
called Continuations that will allow scalable AJAX applications to be built, with threadless waiting for asynchronous events.

Threads are a big problem with web development. Each thread needs a given stack (about 256k per thread give or take). About the minimum you can go is about 16k. This limits the number of connections a given webserver can keep open. AJAX or not it’s a huge scalability problem (read the C10K problem if you want a deep backgrounder).

As a Java developer this version of Jetty is very compelling. I’m sick of Tomcat. (I’ve been migrating to PHP) but still find myself wanting a servlet engine. This might be the feature that puts Jetty over the top for me.