simple webserver and rest with jetty and NO XML

Starting a new web project (maybe with rest?) in Java requires mastery of many complex abstract components. You need a webapp for tomcat (fiddle with some xml files), spring (import plenty of jars and add some more xml files), pick a rest framework like spring, resteasy, restlset (fiddle with annotations), deploy to tomcat and go.

I won't deny all this components add structure, reusability and a lot of good stuff, but sometimes I have simple needs that scream for simple solutions.

Few days ago I needed just that: a simple database with a REST api, and the ability to serve a few static files.

I used jetty embedded and it took was one maven dependency, 3 classes, 150 lines of java, 15 minutes and NO XML.

I was so satisfied with the result work that I served myself a beer and posted the code on github. The actual project implemented a datastore on neo4j, but for sake of simplicity I released it on github as a dumb in-memory key-value store.

According to apache bench, with as little as 8m memory (-Xmx8m) the server was able to handle 2k concurrent users at a rate of 1500 requests per second.

The main is as simple as this:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Server server = new Server(8080);
    Context root = new Context(server, "/");

    // configure the default servlet to serve static files from "htdocs"
    root.getInitParams().put("org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.Default.resourceBase", "htdocs");
    root.addServlet(new ServletHolder(new DefaultServlet()), "/");

    // use /uuid to get a fresh id
    root.addServlet(new ServletHolder(new UUIDServlet()), "/uuid");

    // the actual key/value store
    root.addServlet(new ServletHolder(new KeyValueServlet()), "/store/*");
    server.start();
}

Get the code: Simple webserver and REST with jetty and NO XML on GitHub