it is not a dumb question.
No this is not a substitute for AJP. It is just an efficient transport TCP level relaying and it does not on it's own support any particular protocol. I expect to be able to deployed all the existing Jetty protocols on the UnixSocket connector: http, http2, http2c, fastcgi, websocket etc.
So we still do not support AJP, no matter how it is transported.
Our decision to drop AJP was based on:
- pure HTTP proxying outperformed it by at least 20%
- the versions and evolution of AJP appeared confused and unclear
- the semantics of mod-balancer appear superior to mod-jk
- Dealing with forwarded-for headers is pretty simple and we provide a request customizer for that.
- We had zero commercial clients using AJP and little community support maintaining it.
- AJP integration with Jetty < 9 was horrible
Having said all that, Jetty-9 is very capable of supporting multiple protocols and it should not be too difficult to rewrite an AJP connector (it would be a rewrite rather than a port of what was there before), but many of the issues listed above would have to be addressed before we made the attempt.
cheers