Why NanoHttpd

The Java 6 version of nanohttpd was born when we realized that embedding Jetty inside our Android application was going to inflate the size without bringing along features that we were going to need. The search for a smaller more streamlined HTTP server lead us to nanohttpd as the project had started with exactly the same goals, but we wanted to clear up the old code - move from Java 1.1, run static code analysis tools and cleanup the findings and pull out sample/test code from the source.

In the words of the original founder of the project

I couldn't find a small enough, embeddable and easily modifiable HTTP server that I could just copy and paste into my other Java projects. Every one of them consisted of dozens of .java files and/or jars, usually with - from my point of view - "overkill features" like servlet support, web administration, configuration files, logging etc.

Since that time we fixed a number of bugs, moved the build to maven and pulled out the samples from the runtime JAR to further slim it down.

The two projects pooled resources in early 2013, merging code-bases, to better support the user base and reduce confusion over why two NanoHttpd projects existed.