Shipping an official HTTP client in Netty (NETTY-333)

[Kevin Burton]

I was looking at NETTY-333 (and have been thinking about this a bit lately)

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/NETTY-333?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel#issue-tabs

... and I think Netty should ship an official HTTP client. Not just an
example.

This would be a replacement for java.net.URL or say Jakarta HttpClient.

This would have the following advantages:

1. More people would be able to use Netty.  Right now Netty is mostly an API
for building clients and servers but this would mean that people can use
Netty out of the box for their usages.

2. The client would use best practices and avoid common bugs.  I built a
client in Peregrine that uses Netty and I've already been bitten by a few
issues I didn't anticipate.

3. Developers would benefit from bugs fixed in the client moving forward as
they are fixed.

I also think we may need to build a different type of client that isn't
necessarily fully async.

What I did with peregrine (as it fits directly into the model I need) is
that we write to a buffer from the main thread.  The buffer then writes to
Netty which then does Async IO (this is an HTTP PUT client).  The great
thing about this model is that if the receiver can't handle the data being
sent to it, the client just blocks.

In our usage we often write from 1 client to N servers.  Anywhere from
10-1000 ... so the async buys us the ability to not need 1k threads doing
the IO.

Thoughts?
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