What is a good cross platform Java web server for development?

My team is developing javascript apps; and uses a mixture of Windows & Mac dev machines.

I'm looking for a simple local webserver to be used during development that allows serving of static resources from a specific directory

In the windows world CassiniD开发者_Go百科ev would be perfect; or in the Unix world Python's SimpleHTTPServer would also work.

Ideally I'd like something similar written in Java (but not forcing all the servlet stuff on you)

Jetty is a great option if you want something written in Java. It is a servlet container too, but very lightweight. I'm not sure why you need something written in Java though if it's just serving static content.

If you're looking for a bit of fun in developing your web server why not take a look at Node.JS - it will run on all types of machine and serve your static content fast, if you write a simple JavaScript program to serve the files (or use a pre-written one).

you can use tomcat. if you put flat html in the webapps/ROOT directory of tomcat (whereever you install it to) it will serve up those pages for you.

If it really is just html, why not just go with straight up apache? Just point its web root at the directories you want to serve from...

Macs have a web server preinstalled. It's Apache, you only need to activate it in the System preferences. By default it serves the content of a subdirectory of your Users directory. Otherwise as others have suggested use Jetty or apache tomcat.