The Netty project team is proud to announce the first alpha release of Netty 3.4.0. Please note that it is an alpha release, so you might need to test it thoroughly before putting it into production.
The JAR file is already on Maven central repository. You can also get the full tarball from the download page.
This version introduces an often requested feature that allows a user to schedule an arbitrary task (i.e. java.lang.Runnable) for execution in an I/O thread:
Channel ch = ...;
ch.getPipeline().execute(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
// Some task that is supposed to be executed in an I/O thread
}
});
Another important change is the increased granularity of connect timeout. Previously, Netty checked connection timeouts every 500 milliseconds, which is eternity in a fast network. The new check interval is now 10 milliseconds.
Along with the new feature and small improvement mentioned above, this release also includes an optimized version of ReplayingDecoder which now avoids unnecessary memory allocation and copy wherever possible. If you are using a decoder such as HttpMessageDecoder, you will see better numbers in throughput and GC pressure.
For the detailed list of the changes, please refer to the issue tracker page.
P.S. From this release, you need JDK 1.7 to build Netty. Please note that Netty still runs fine with Java 5 and it will always do for 3.x releases.