Progressively decode a message (and other questions)

[Ashwin Jayaprakash]

Hi, I'm a Netty noob and I have some basic questions. I'm still exploring
the API so be gentle :)

Is there a way to incrementally decode a message from a ChannelBuffer? Like
this:

   1. Read some key integer fields
   2. If not interested, discard message - do not decode the rest of the
   message. Just discard it. How do I cancel further downstream codecs?


There are some other restrictions:

   - I do not want to do a getBytes(xx) on the message and make a copy of
   the remaining message from the buffer to a byte[] . I know people would
   suggest this because it's the easiest workaround by doing the decode on my
   own from a byte[]. I want to avoid copying the bytes again and again from
   layer to layer
   - If I used slice() I suppose it would help avoid a copy?
   - Are these channelbuffers pooled? How long can I hang on to the
   MessageEvent, Channel or Channelbuffer instance? Would I be starving some
   other component/connection?
      - FYI, I had asked a similar question on the Google Protobuf forum -
      http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf/browse_thread/thread/4563998c85d01882/1859fe2958485da2
   - If I want to re-route my server request from 1 server to another server
   - read some bits and then decide to "forward" the message to another server,
   can I just do a zero-copy of the original bytes and send them to another
   server? You see - like a Hibernate disconnected session or a SQL
   Disconnected row set?
   - The server now becomes a client to another server, so can I just use
      the same buffers and "transfer" them to the other handler that
is talking to
      the final server?

Confused? :)

Super clean APIs though, I'm impressed.

Regards,
Ashwin Jayaprakash.
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