Jetty vs. gcj

[Jeff Sturm <jsturm at one-point dot com>]

Since there have been a few questions lately about Jetty on this list, I
thought I'd take a stab at making a recent release work (we've been using
a significantly modified subset of Jetty for some time now).

(Jetty is a standalone web server and servlet container, similar to
Tomcat.  It's license is derived from the open-source compatible Artistic
license.)

The build hurdles to overcome were:

- Jetty uses Ant to build.  Not knowing the current status of Ant and gcj
(the RHUG build doesn't seem to work, tried that), I wrote a simple
makefile instead.
- Jetty depends on classes in javax.net and javax.management.  I stubbed
out both and included in the tarball below.  (The stub classes aren't
correct, or even close, but enough to build the project.)
- The SSL implementation depends on classes in com.sun.  I removed this
source file entirely, so SSL is disabled.  It could be replaced with a
free alternative.
- One source file didn't build due to a probable inner class file bug, and
another had trouble with libgcj's java.security.Permissions
implementation.  These require more investigation.
- Jasper libraries are required for JSP.  I didn't attempt to integrate
these.
- Jetty needs an XML parser.  I used Xerces, in spite of its large size.
It should be possible to use a smaller SAX-only parser.
- The libgcj runtime seems to leave a lot of zombie processes around
(addr2line, etc).  I disabled libgcj backtraces completely for my tests.

Eventually I'd like a gcj-friendly Makefile to make it into the main Jetty
distribution, or perhaps hosted at RHUG.  In the meantime, download
it from:

http://ops2.one-point.com/~jsturm/jetty-4.2.9-gcj.tar.gz

Initial experiments with IBM's JRE and gcj 3.3 show gcj benchmarking about
50% faster on static content in a smaller (~12MB) footprint.  We are
definitely encouraged by these experiments.

Jeff