A Bird's View of Netty

Instruction

Netty is a NIO client server framework which enables quick and easy development of network applications such as protocol servers and clients. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server.

‘Quick and easy’ doesn’t mean that a resulting application will suffer from a maintainability or a performance issue. Netty has been designed carefully with the experiences earned from the implementation of a lot of protocols such as FTP, SMTP, HTTP, and various binary and text-based legacy protocols. As a result, Netty has succeeded to find a way to achieve ease of development, performance, stability, and flexibility without a compromise.

Features

Design

Unified API for various transport types - blocking and non-blocking socket

Based on a flexible and extensible event model which allows clear separation of concerns

Highly customizable thread model - single thread, one or more thread pools such as SEDA

True connectionless datagram socket support (since 3.1)

Ease of use

Well-documented Javadoc, user guide and examples

No additional dependencies, JDK 5 (Netty 3.x) or 6 (Netty 4.x) is enough

Note: Some components such as HTTP/2 might have more requirements. Please refer to the Requirements page for more information.

Performance

Better throughput, lower latency

Less resource consumption

Minimized unnecessary memory copy

Security

Complete SSL/TLS and StartTLS support

Community

Release early, release often

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