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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T11:43:07+00:00

I’m a long time ASP.NET developer trying to teach myself java. I’ve got Jetty

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I’m a long time ASP.NET developer trying to teach myself java. I’ve got Jetty downloaded and a basic web app setup. The tutorials in Head First Servlets and JSP tell me to reference the container’s servlet-api.jar (or servlet-api-3.0.jar in Jetty’s case) file when compiling, which makes sense since I’m extending the servlet classes and all, but doesn’t this tie my application to a specific container’s servlet implementation? If I compile my app against Jetty, can I still deploy the app under Tomcat or any of the EE servers (glassfish, jboss, etc…)?

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  1. Editorial Team

    No, this shouldn’t be a problem because you aren’t referencing servlet-specific classes. servlet-api.jar is a well-documented specification in the form of several interfaces and abstract classes.

    Every container has to have a copy of this JAR (possibly compiled using different Java version, or compiler) because it implements the specification, but the API itself never changes. However note that you don’t really have to reference container-provided JARs. You can safely use maven‘s version or any other you can find. They are all compatible. Sometimes they are not bundled due to various licensing incompatibilities.

    That being said: write once, run everywhere applies here as well.

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