Simple HTTP server in Java using only Java SE API

Question

Is there a way to create a very basic HTTP server (supporting only GET/POST) in Java using just the Java SE API, without writing code to manually parse HTTP requests and manually format HTTP responses? 

Just to be clear, the problem I have with a lot of ServerSocket examples I've seen online is that they do their own request parsing/response formatting and error handling, which is tedious, error-prone, and not likely to be comprehensive, and I'm trying to avoid it for those reasons.

As an example of the manual HTTP manipulation that I'm trying to avoid:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Networking/Webserver/WebServercode.html

Answer 1

You can write a pretty simple embedded Jetty Java server.

Embedded Jetty means that the server (Jetty) shipped together with the application as opposed of deploying the application on external Jetty server.

So if in non-embedded approach your webapp built into WAR file which deployed to some external server (Tomcat / Jetty / etc), in embedded Jetty, you write the webapp and instantiate the jetty server in the same code base.

An example for embedded Jetty Java server you can git clone and use: https://github.com/stas-slu/embedded-jetty-java-server-example