I developed a Gradle plugin that run one or more app within a single Jetty instance: plugin doc
The plugin is intended to solve the following issue: GRADLE-886
The plugin is deployed in Maven Central: Maven Central search (For Windows users I recommend to use the version 1.2.0-RELEASE, because this version fixed a bug with file locking in Windows)
The purpose of the plugin, is to use jetty (and gradle) to develop web apps independently of the IDE.