FeatherCon lightweight servlet container

Usage

FeatherCon(tainer) is a lightweight servlet container built around embedded Jetty. The first use case for which FeatherCon was designed was to host small production or tool servers for JAX-RS Jersey-based REST services. Here's how to set up a JAX-RS server, which is taken from one of the unit tests:

String scanPackages = "com.xoom.oss.feathercon";
FeatherCon server = new JerseyServerBuilder(scanPackages).build();
server.start();

Here's how to setup a servlet that serves static content:

ServletConfiguration.Builder servletBuilder = new ServletConfiguration.Builder();
servletBuilder
        .withServletClass(DefaultServlet.class)
        .withPathSpec("/")
        .withInitParameter("resourceBase", "test-data/static/");

FeatherCon.Builder serverBuilder = new FeatherCon.Builder();
serverBuilder.withServletConfiguration(servletBuilder.build());
FeatherCon server = serverBuilder.build();
server.start();

Note that Jersey, the JAX-RS reference implementation, is not a formal dependency of FeatherCon and will therefore not appear in the FeatherCon published POM. If you want to use the JAX-RS JerseyServerBuilder your app must explicitly depend on a Jersey implementation.

A JAX-RS servlet combined with a static content servlet can be produced using the WebappServerBuilder:

String resourceBase = "/tmp";  // path to static content
String restPathSpec = "/api/*";
int serverPort = 8888;
String jerseyScanPackages = "com.xoom.oss.feathercon";
WebappServerBuilder webappServerBuilder = new WebappServerBuilder(jerseyScanPackages, restPathSpec, resourceBase, serverPort);
FeatherCon server = webappServerBuilder.build();
server.start();

So a FeatherConBuilder can be used to host a set of arbitrary servlets with the appropriate configs exercised through the various builder withXXX methods. FeatherCon is also useful in unit tests, where one needs to quickly spin up a fast backend on a per-test basis.

Building

To build using the included Gradle Wrapper:

$ ./gradlew clean build

Installing to the local Maven repository proceeds thusly

$ ./gradlew publishToMavenLocal
...
:publishMavenJavaPublicationToMavenLocal
Uploading: com/xoom/oss/feathercon/1.2.1/feathercon-1.2.1.jar to repository remote at file:/Users/petrovic/.m2/repository/
Transferring 11K from remote
Uploaded 11K
Uploading: com/xoom/oss/feathercon/1.2.1/feathercon-1.2.1-source.jar to repository remote at file:/Users/petrovic/.m2/repository/

Maven coordinates

The binary for this build can be used in a Maven build by specifying this repository in your POM

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
            <id>bintray</id>
            <name>bintray</name>
            <url>http://dl.bintray.com/xoom/xoomoss</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

with this dependency

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.xoom.oss</groupId>
            <artifactId>feathercon</artifactId>
            <version>1.3.2</version>  <!-- or latest in the repository above -->
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

Finally, if in the course of using FeatherCon your code programs to the Servlet API, depend on the Servlet API v3 API, like this

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
        <version>3.0.1</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>