Embedded Jetty and Spring: The Lightweight Antidote for Java EE Complexity

n my 15 years as a software professional I've never seen a software stack as unproductive—not to mention as verbose or complicated—as J2EE, despite its enterprise-grade features. Every single J2EE project I have ever worked on ended the same way: me looking at long lines of Ant build scripts constantly rebuilding WARs and EARs (starting/stopping/re-deploying, and so on). No developer should spend half of his or her day waiting for even the simplest of code changes to be redeployed by an Ant script.

When my current company evaluated the future maintenance of our J2EE-based applications, it became clear that some of the core components needed a wholesale rewrite. Choosing Spring over Java EE 5 was an obvious choice (more on that later), but choosing the appropriate web container took a bit more time. After struggling with some of the "bugginess" of Eclipse WTP (especially when it comes to re-deploying project code into the web container), a simpler, leaner alternative emerged: using Spring with embedded Jetty.