In the spring of 2003, I spent a crazy week in San Francisco with Greg Wilkins and Jan Bartel, spearheading the design of their Core Developers Network venture. I remember working all night on their new website with Dain Sundstrom and Jeremy Boynes, and launching the story in the early hours of the morning that a large chunk of the JBoss persistence and web server team were defecting to go their own route. Like the energy from splitting an atom, splitting an idea releases tremendous power. The heat from that dissolution spawned the Geronimo project, and much of the rest is history.
One thing that stands out in my memory is how insanely powerful and sleek Jetty was, and is. On the morning that CDN split off from JBoss, we got “slashed”. The web server was running at Jeremy Boynes’ house near San Francisco, it was running on Jetty, and it never buckled once. It is, in my opinion, the single best web server platform for deploying Java apps that has ever been built. So, it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that I’m moving back to Jetty, after a long absence (brought on more by the lack of a need to do web development than anything else).
I’m overjoyed to see that Greg and Jan are still at the helm, independent in their development, doing amazing work, and living the dream.
