In a certain stage of webapp-development, there is the requirement to deploy your application to a “real” webserver. If you are using Maven for your build-management you probably use the provided jetty plugin. This plugin allows you to start your application without downloading and configuring a webserver on your own.
The difference between a webserver on the internet and a local machine is the accessibility and the need, to encrypt your sessions. This is normally done by providing a HTTPS-protocol access to your web-application.
Hubert Klein Ikkink has written a nice blog-post how this can be achieve with the jetty-maven plugin.