[jetty-dev] Jsp and Jetty at Eclipse

[Jan Bartel <janb@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This email is to summarize the status of the jetty jsp module, which
is currently hosted at Codehaus, but which we have been attempting to
move across to Eclipse.

Jetty-7 and jetty-6 both use Glassfish's jsp engine. We obtain that
by checking out its srcs from Glassfish svn and building the jars
into jsp-2.1-glassfish.jar and jsp-api-2.1-glassfish.jar. Dropping
those jars into jetty's lib directory makes jsp available.

In order to move those jars to Eclipse, we've found and fixed a couple
of trivial IP issues.

However, it has recently come to light that the situation is a lot
more complicated than ensuring the license headers on the source
files are correct.

The jsp-api-2.1.glassfish jar that we build contains:
 + javax/servlet/jsp
 + javax/servlet/jsp/el
 + javax/servlet/jsp/tagext
 + javax/el
 + javax/servlet/jsp/jstl

The jstl stuff really  shouldn't be in there, and
can be split out into a separate jstl jar (or better yet, hopefully 
we could use an "official" jstl 1.2 jar).

The problem lies with the javax.el.* package. Work has been going on 
in jsr245 to unify this expression language api which is used in jsp
with that which is used in jsf. 

The "official" jsp-api-2.1 jar contains the pre-unified javax.el 
classes.

However, the jsp 2.1 implementation from Glassfish relies on the 
post-unified javax.el.* classes.

Therefore we cannot simply use the "official" jsp-api-2.1.jar
with the Glassfish impl jar.

What we need is:

+ a jsp 2.1 api jar that contains the unified javax.el.* classes
 or
+ a jsp 2.1 api jar without javax.el.*, AND a recent javax.el.* jar 

The difficulty lies in finding some properly versioned sources
for these items that work with the Glassfish jsp impl, and whose
jars are available in a public maven repo, and built with <= jdk1.5.

There are many versions on dev.java.net, however
the sources don't seem to be available as svn tags nor as download
bundles for a combination of jsp-api and el-api that would work.

For example,  it seems that a combination of jsp-api-2.1.3-b06.jar
and el-api-1.1.jar *may* work against our Glassfish impl, however
there are no sources available that I can find (either as an svn tag 
nor bundle) for the el-api-1.1.jar.

Our other option is to forget trying to get our current Glassfish
2.1 jsp engine into Eclipse for use with jetty-7, and instead
to target jsp-2.2 (which is mandated for servlet-3.0) for jetty-8. 

The advantage of this is that the javax.el.* unification has been 
formalized and is a part of the jsp-2.2 specification:

http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/mrel/jsr245/index.html

There are already javax.servlet.jsp api 2.2 jars and srcs available 
from dev.java.net. So it may be easier to bring those to Eclipse.
We would just need to find a version of Glassfish jsp engine that 
matches that api for use with jetty-8.

Input, anyone?

cheers
Jan
--
Jan Bartel, Webtide LLC | janb@xxxxxxxxxxx | http://www.webtide.com