You can run your web applications on an embedded web container. Now I will show you how to use Jetty.
But first a little bit about Jetty. It's a web container like Apache Tomcat. If you google Jetty, you will see Jetty on Codehaus and Eclipse. Jetty was a long time Codehaus project, but later it was moved to Eclipse Foundation.
Which version should you use depends on your Java SE and Java EE version. Let's see a documentation. There's "What version do I use?" and there's version 9, 8, 7. Version 9 requires Java SE 7 and implements Java EE 6.
To use Jetty 9 in your project add this plugin to your pom.xml file:
<plugin> <groupId>org.eclipse.jetty</groupId> <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>9.1.0.v20131115</version> </plugin>
To use Jetty 8 go to Codehaus, there's documentation and use this plugin instead:
<plugin> <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId> <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>8.1.14.v20131031</version> </plugin>
To run Jetty server, run your Maven application with goal:
jetty:run
To stop Jetty server click on button Terminate in Eclipse.
You can also stop Jetty server using goal jetty:stop, but you have to configure it first:
<plugin> <groupId>org.eclipse.jetty</groupId> <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>9.1.0.v20131115</version> <configuration> <stopPort>9966</stopPort> <stopKey>foo</stopKey> </configuration> </plugin>
And then if I run goal jetty:run, I can use goal jetty:stop to stop this Jetty instance.
There are lot's of configuration options, see documentation.