# History

Jetty was originally written by Greg Wilkins, founder of Mort Bay Consulting Australia and UK, in 1995 as an entry in the Sun Microsystems Australia Java programming competition, which it won. In 1998, Jetty became fully open source and freely available for download, use and modification in accordance with the terms of its license.

Greg and other Mort Bay consultants continue to be the prime developers of Jetty, however we recognise the invaluable contributions of the open source community in the form of feedback, testing and patches and we invite you to take part.

# Timeline

November 2002. | Jetty 4.2.0 released with even greater performance. The buffering and thread pooling were completely reworked.
September 2002. | Jetty 4.1.0 released with greater performance and improved apache integration.
June 2002. | Jetty 4.1.x development series starts, focused on improved performance and greater simplicity. Also increase support for apache integration.
March 2002. | Jetty 4.0.0 release, supporting 2.3 servlet spec and optional JDK 1.4 features. This release has focused on 2.3 features while retaining Jetty's performance.
October 2001. | Jetty 4 development starts to support the 2.3 servlet specification.
September 2001. | Jetty 3.1.0 released a change to the org.mortbay package names, many performance improvements and a small restructure to support JMX management.
January 2001. | Stability releases of Jetty 3 with increased performance.
October 2000. | Jetty 3 released for Java 1.2, Servlet 2.2 and the HTTP/1.1. Passes Jakarta/watchdog servlet tests. The code base has been significantly trimmed and refined from Jetty2.
December 1999. | Jetty 3 development started for Java 1.2, Servlet 2.2 and the latest HTTP/1.1 RFC.
July 1999. | Jetty 2.2.0 improved configuration and dynamic servlets. Many improvements and bug fixes contributed from the Open Source community.
January 1999. | Jetty 2.1.0 upgraded to JSDK 2.1 API.
October 1998. | Jetty 2.0.1 released as Open Source
October 1998. | Jetty 2.0 released with HTTP/1.1 support.
December 1997. | Jetty development finally progressed to a Release 1.0 stage. The package hierarchy was moved to a org.mortbay structure and merged with the other software packages of Mort Bay Consulting. The JSDK versions of the javax.servlets were included in the release in accordance with JavaSoft licensing requirements.

February 1997.

All involved agreed that MBServler was a terrible name, so many weeks of effort were put in to remove all references to that name. In the process the HttpHandler architecture was developed and support for the beta1.0 javax.servlet API added. Jetty was picked as the new name because:

- it started with a J
- there is a little jetty in the Mort Bay Logo.
- jetty:// kind of looks like http://
- you can pronounce j-80 or j-'eighty' as in port 80, the HTTP port.

December 1996. | The HTML generation package was used re-implemented and documented. Release V4.5B of MBServler and IssueTracker were made available.
May 1996. | Mort Bay entered a partnership with Intelligent Switched Systems to develop telephony and WWW based authenticated service platforms. MBServler is used extensively in those platforms and was incrementally improved by the process.
March 1996. | Mort Bay Consulting Pty. Ltd. took over the server and tracking application. The server was renamed MBServler (a Servlet Serving Server) and ported to the then release alpha javax.servlet API.
December 1995. | Greg Wilkins wrote a HTTP Server and WWW defect tracking application as an entry to the Sun Microsystems Australia Java programming contest. Greg's entry won the contest. This pre-dated Javasoft's announcement of Jeeves and the javax.servlet API, so the server defined its own API.