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MM-HTTP: Simple Java HTTP Server

by: micah | March 24th, 2009 |

I was recently working on a Java project where I needed to serve up a couple pages via HTTP. These pages were nothing fancy but their content was purely dynamic. It’s also worth noting that the project was a shrink wrapped product.

The most immediate options that came to mind when I thought Java/Web were, Servlets, Struts, EJB, …. oh my! These options seemed like overkill. I didn’t want to complicated the deployment of this product with beasties like Tomcat and JBoss. That’s just silly. I wanted a simple web server that I could plug into my code and serve a couple dynamic pages. I took a quick peek at Jetty and thought “No thanks”.

Of course, all along I was thinking about FitNesse. FitNesse is a stand-alone web server. And it’s just a jar file. In fact, I have fond memories of writing the FitNesse HTTP server and it occurred to me how simple it would be to extract that module into a self contained library. So I did it. It was simple. And I call it MM-HTTP.

So how do you write a Hello World web app with MM-HTTP? Like this:

1. import mmhttp.server.*;
2. import mmhttp.protocol.*;
4. public class HelloWorld
5. {
6. public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
7. {
8. Server server = new Server(8000);
9. server.register("hello.*", HelloResponder.class);
10. server.start();
11. }
13. public static class HelloResponder implements Responder
14. {
15. public Response makeResponse(Server server, Request request) throws Exception
16. {
17. return new SimpleResponse(200, "<h1>Hello World!</h1>");
18. }
19. }
20. }

You’ll need to download the mmhttp jar file. Once you’ve pasted the above code in a HelloWorld.java file, you can compile and run the web server like so:

1. javac -classpath mmhttp-1.1.jar HelloWorld.java
2. java -classpath mmhttp-1.1.jar HelloWorld

Then plug the following URL into your browser. http://localhost:8000/hello. That’s it!

To find out more, visit the MMHTTP github page and the javadocs. Enjoy!

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