LarsBlog

Today I set up Jetty so that I could play around with some very quick and simple gsp (groovy server pages) development using my favorite light-weight servlet container, Jetty.  No building or packaging - just editing .gsp files in a directory - PHP style.

Here's how I did it:

1. I downloaded and unzipped jetty 8.1.3.
    
   
2. I edited $JETTY_HOME/etc/jetty.xml to change the default port to one that was free on my PC:
   

   <Set name="port"><Property name="jetty.port" default="8081"/></Set>

    
3. In the contexts directory, I modified the out-of-the-box test.xml and changed the contextPath from "/" to "/test" (because I wanted my groovy pages to use the root context "/"):
   

   <Set name="contextPath">/test</Set>

    
4. Then I copied text.xml to a file called root.xml.  I set the contextPath to "/" and the "war" path to /webapps/defaultroot:
   

   <?xml version="1.0"  encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   <!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Jetty//Configure//EN" "http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/configure.dtd">
   <Configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
     <Set name="contextPath">/</Set>
     <Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webapps/defaultroot</Set>
     <Set name="extractWAR">true</Set>
     <Set name="copyWebDir">false</Set>
     <Set name="defaultsDescriptor"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/etc/webdefault.xml</Set>
   </Configure>

    
5. Then in the folder $JETTY_HOME/webapps. I created a directory called "defaultroot" and put a simple "Hellow World" test index.jsp in there.
    
6. Now start jetty from the command-line using "java -jar start.jar".  If you access http://localhost:8081/ in your browser, you should see the contenst of your test "Hello World".
    
7. If we're good to this point, we're now ready to add groovy support.  I downloaded Groovy 1.8 (binary), and from the zip file extracted the file embeddable/groovy-all-1.8.6.jar from the zip, and copied it to $JETTY_HOME/lib/ext.
    
8. Then, I edited $JETTY_HOME/etc/webdefault.xml and added the following servlet mapping after the JSP Servlet mapping:
   

   <!-- ==================================================================== -->
   <!-- Groovy/GSP Servlet                                                   -->
   <!-- ==================================================================== -->
   <servlet>
       <servlet-name>Groovy</servlet-name>
       <servlet-class>groovy.servlet.GroovyServlet</servlet-class>
   </servlet>
   
   <servlet-mapping>
       <servlet-name>Groovy</servlet-name>
       <url-pattern>*.groovy</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>
   
   <servlet>
       <servlet-name>GroovyTemplate</servlet-name>
       <servlet-class>groovy.servlet.TemplateServlet</servlet-class>    
   </servlet>
   <servlet-mapping>
       <servlet-name>GroovyTemplate</servlet-name>
       <url-pattern>*.gsp</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>

    
   This means that by default, every web app deployed on your Jetty instance will be able to process groovy pages with URLs of .groovy and .gsp - including the "defaultroot" app we created above.
    
   
9. Rename your test "index.jsp" in "defaultroot" to "index.gsp" and restart Jetty.  Now, when you hit http://localhost:8081 in your browser, if your groovy page has been processed successfully you should still see your test Hellow World!
    
10. Now you're good to go.  Here's a good introduction to Groovy Server Pages to get you started:
    http://www.javabeat.net/articles/print.php?article_id=249