Netty 3.1.0.BETA3 released: Performance and Little Endian

[Trustin Lee]

Hi folks,

Netty 3.1.0.BETA3, the third beta release of 3.1 branch, has been released.

The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework and tools for rapid development of maintainable, high-performance, high-scalability protocol servers and clients.

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

Please visit our web site to download it:

  * http://www.jboss.org/netty/

As always, your feed back is more than appreciated.  Please visit the discussion forum and leave some comments and questions:

  * http://www.jboss.org/netty/community.html

Alternatively, please follow us at Twitter and send a message:

  * http://twitter.com/netty_project

Improved Performance
====================
Thanks to Wade Poziombka's help, the NIO socket transport became even faster than ever.  Thanks Wade!

ConnectionlessBootstrap
=======================
Datagram support has been added in 3.1.0.BETA1, but it didn't have a proper Bootstrap implementation.  This release adds the ConnectionlessBootstrap which extends Bootstrap to support Old IO based UDP transport and other planned connectionless transports.  The 'Quote of the Moment' example has been updated following this change.

Little Endian Support
=====================
Although most binary protocol uses big endian, some proprietary protocols which were developed on x86 or x64 architecture use little endian.  Preliminary support for little endian was added in 3.1.0.ALPHA3, but it didn't work very well for a certain case.  This release fixes that particular case.  Now it seems to work flawlessly.

In case you wonder what endianness is, please refer to the Wikipedia:

  * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness

Building on Windows
===================
maven-jdocbook-plugin was misconfigured to lead 'connection timed out' during docbook generation, hence the full build fails.  I recently had a chance to run a build on Windows by myself and was able to fix the build failure.

Upcoming Releases
=================
The next release will be 3.1.0.CR1 (Candidate Release) with complete Javadoc.  Please keep us updated with any bugs, design issues, API usability feed back, and questions.

Miscellaneous
=============
For the full changelog, please visit here:

  * http://tinyurl.com/oh8rok

Again, as always, your feed back is more than appreciated.  Please visit the discussion forum and feel free to leave some comments and questions:

  * http://www.jboss.org/netty/community.html
   
Alternatively, please follow us at Twitter and send a message:

  * http://twitter.com/netty_project

Cheers,
--
Trustin Lee, http://gleamynode.net/