Java Server Pages (JSP) are a technology for building dynamic websites with Java. They are basically a mixture of HTML and Java code. They run in a special server, a servlet container, which compiles them to Java Servlets, Java objects with handler routines which are called whenever a client (user) accesses the page via HTTP(S). Thus, in order to get your JSP to run, you deploy it into a servlet container, like Tomcat, Jetty, or JBoss. This means you have to install the servlet container.

This small project is an example for how you can build a "fat" jar which includes both the JSPs and the servlet container (Jetty). This jar is stand-alone, i.e., you can directly run the jar and access the server page without any installation or deployment.

You can compile it with Maven with goals compile and package. As result, you will get the standAloneJSPs-full.jar, which you can run via java -jar standAloneJSPs-full.jar without any additional requirements. It will then start the internal servlet container and then a browser to visit the entry page. In other words, different from our deployable JSP examples, you do not need a servlet container. This is similar to what we did in the HTTP Proxy Servlet example.

If you import this project in Eclipse, it may first show you a lot of errors. (I recommend using Eclipse Mars or later.) This is a Maven project, so you should "update" it first in Eclipse by

1. Make sure that you can see the package view on the left-hand side of the Eclipse window.
2. Right-click on the project (standAloneJSPsWithJetty) in the package view.
3. In the opening pop-up menu, left-click on Maven.
4. In the opening sub-menu, left-click on Update Project....
5. In the opening window...
6. Make sure the project (standAloneJSPsWithJetty) is selected.
7. Make sure that Update project configuration from pom.xml is selected.
8. You can also select Clean projects.
9. Click OK.
10. Now the structure of the project in the package view should slightly change, the project will be re-compiled, and the errors should disappear.

Now you can actually build the project, i.e., generate a jar file that you can directly execute on the command line and which contains both your JSPs as well as the (Jetty) servlet container:

1. Make sure that you can see the package view on the left-hand side of the Eclipse window.
2. Right-click on the project (standAloneJSPsWithJetty) in the package view.
3. In the opening pop-up menu, choose Run As.
4. In the opening sub-menu choose Run Configurations....
5. In the opening window, choose Maven Build
6. In the new window Run Configurations / Create, manage, and run configurations, choose Maven Build in the small white pane on the left side.
7. Click New launch configuration (the first symbol from the left on top of the small white pane).
8. Write a useful name for this configuration in the Name field. You can use this configuration again later.
9. In the tab Main enter the Base directory of the project, this is the folder called javaServerPages/standAloneJSPsWithJetty containing the Eclipse/Maven project.
10. Under Goals, enter clean compile package. This will build a jar archive.
11. Click Apply
12. Click Run
13. The build will start, you will see its status output in the console window.
14. The folder target will contain a file standAloneJSPs-full.jar after the build. This is the executable archive with our application.

Under Linux, you can also simply run make_linux.sh in this project's folder to build the servlet without Eclipse, given that you have Maven installed.

This project is derived from embedded-jetty-jsp with copyright (c) 1995-2013 Mort Bay Consulting Pty. Ltd. Compared to that project, the main differences are

1. the "fat" jar, making the application stand-alone,
2. the usage of different (newer) versions of the dependencies in the Maven pom
3. a new example servlet
4. with the goal to make the example smaller,
   1. the Main class has been redesigned
   2. packages have been renamed
   3. while other classes and elements from that project have been deleted.
5. a browser is automatically opened and pointed to the entry page of the example

The license of this project is Apache License v2.0.