Is Netty the right choice for my project?

["Trustin Lee (이희승)"]

Hi Kevin,

Since nobody's stepping up, let me comment.

stemkev wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm starting a new project and I'm trying to make a decision about how my
> Java Swing client applications will communicate with my server. 
> 
> In the past I've used a polling mechanism over HTTP, where the server would
> queue up events for client sessions and the clients would poll continuously
> for those events. This approach worked fine but I always thought it was a
> bit excessive having every client making endless requests. With the new
> project, there will be far fewer updates being sent to clients so if I use
> the same approach most of the polling will be wasted effort. But I would
> still like updates to appear in a timely fashion. So I started looking at
> Netty to see if I could use it to implement a push-based solution.
> 
> I've only ever used the polling over HTTP approach before so I feel like I'm
> stepping outside my comfort zone a bit and I have a few questions on some
> technical issues that I know how to solve in the HTTP world but not in the
> Netty world:
> 
> * How do I perform user authentication (by username/password)? 
> In the HTTP world I would pass an authentication token serialized in each
> request. I'm guessing I could do the same thing with Netty.

Netty is basically a framework and you can do almost everything you can
do with a plain socket.

You can implement an authentication mechanism you prefer because
authentication in HTTP is often inserting some values into an HTTP
message as a header and you can do that.  However, Netty itself doesn't
provide an implementation of HTTP auth mechanism such as 'digest'.

If you are talking about non-HTTP custom socket protocol, then you will
have to design your protocol and keep authentication in mind.

> * How do I do load balancing if I have multiple server-side modules?

There are many ways to load-balance multiple server instances, but Netty
is not a load balancer but a generic framework that enables you to write
a network application.  You will have to use other load-balancing
technology or implement it by yourself (using Netty or using something
else).

> * What should I do if clients are running behind a firewall?
> I have seen a Jira issue regarding HTTP tunnelling
> (https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/NETTY-246). Is this the only solution?
> If tunnelling over HTTP, does this mean I need a servlet container on the
> server?

I'd prefer to use HTTP as a primary protocol rather than using HTTP
tunneling if your concern is not performance.

HTH,
Trustin

> 
> 
> Any advice would be great.
> 
> Kevin
> 
> 

-- 
what we call human nature in actuality is human habit
http://gleamynode.net/


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