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A Survey of Servlet Containers
Asurvey of the currently available open source servlet containers yields only a few products. This was not always the case. In the early days when the servlet specification was fairly new, many people created servlet containers. As the specification matured, it took more effort to keep up with the technologies demanded by the specification and by competing open source projects. Some efforts went by the wayside and disappeared. Others merged with other open source projects to share the development load. In at least one case, the free open source container project was closed and the company attempted to make it a fee-based open source project. The products left to choose from today are:
· Enhydra
· Jetty
· Paperclips
· Tomcat
There may be other free servers or servers that may have been open source in the past (Resin comes to mind), but at this time these are the only servers that are both free and currently available under open source licenses. Of these four, only Jetty and Tomcat seem to be enjoying steady uninterrupteddevelopment and continue to conform to the latest servlet specifications.
At this writing the GNU Paperclips product apparently has not been updated for almost 2 years. Enhydra has recently completed a transition to anew open source community and has fallen far behind the other containers. Hopefully, in this new development community, Enhydra will quickly start moving forward again, but in the meantime we’re left with Jetty and Tomcat as the products to evaluate
