A few years ago I was quite excited by jo! as a servlet container to do RIFE development with. However, at the time it only supported version 2.2 of the servlet spec and I wanted to use filters.

Since RIFE is soon to hit version 1.0, I decided to go over the available servlet containers again and noticed that tagtraum silently released version 1.1 of jo! which supports version 2.3 of the servet spec. What I like about this servlet container is that you can run it with or without a Swing GUI. The GUI is very handy since you can very easily experiment with your setup and immediately have access to all the log files. You can even deploy WARs by simply dragging and dropping them on the windows (doesn't seem to work on MacOSX yet).

This is the full feature list:

• HTTP/1.1 including byte-ranges, auto-chunking, pipelining, etc.
• Servlet API 2.2 (2.3 starting with jo! 1.1)
• JSP 1.1 (1.2 starting with jo! 1.1)
• Source level JSP debugging a.k.a JSR-45 (starting with jo! 1.1)
• Auto reload of WARs
• Hot deployment of WARs
• Drag and drop deployment of WARs
• Auto internationalization
• Auto servlet and jsp reloading
• Easy to use Swing console
• Advanced thread management
• Memory sensitive file cache
• Automatic compressed transfer of text or html files
• Virtual hosts
• Mac OS X support
• Embeddable
• ...

Give it a try when you're developing your next web application.