Hi all,
Both SPDY and the upcoming HTTP2 protocol require the use of an SSL extension called ALPN (Application Layer Protocol Negotiation). Unfortunately this is not supported in current JDK's (it should appear in JDK9), so the only way to support these protocols in Java at the moment is to modify the boot class path and override the JDK SSL classes to add support for this.
In practice this means add jetty-alpn-boot.jar to the boot class path, however the exact version of the jar that is required depends on the JVM version, which means we can't just ship a jar and add the boot class path stuff to our startup scripts.
I have come up with a proof on concept[1] for how to deal with this, that will download the appropriate ALPN jar for the current server if -alpn is passed to the startup script, however we still need some way to handle this in domain mode, where we need to make sure the servers are all started with the appropriate parameter (worst case we could just require users to install the appropriate JAR themselves, and then set the appropriate JAVA_OPTS).
Hopefully the need for this will go away with Java 9, so I am not sure how much effort we should spend dealing with this.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Stuart