Personally - if you're going to provide an API that supports non blocking operations without limiting what the user can do in terms of power/performance then what's wrong with the Channel/Selector API? This was designed by experts to do just that. Why do we think we can do any better? If we're trying to provide a higher level abstraction to the the channel/selector API then we're going down the route of writing our own NIO framework, which seems a big waste of time to me since there are already frameworks out there who have gone through that pain. (Not Invented Here syndrome etc) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3980275#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...