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Netty 5.0.0.Alpha5 released

by chrisvest
on

We are happy to announce the forth Alpha release of the upcoming netty 5.0.0. This release removes a lot of code-duplication and API cleanup. Besides this it also adds support for Unix Domain Sockets when using the JDK NIO implementation.

We plan to continue to release often while in Alpha* to allow people to provide feedback easily and get changes in a frequent manner.

These are the major changes since Alpha 5:

  • The AbstractChannel has been simplified and stream-lined, increasing the body of shared code between the various transports, and making it easier to implement new transports.
  • There is a new HTTP headers API, copied from ServiceTalk, that replaces the previous DefaultHeaders family of APIs.
  • With the new HTTP header APIs, we are now also validating HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 headers more strictly.
  • Buffer leak detection has been improved, and numerous leaks have been fixed as a result.
  • Mutation methods have been removed from AsciiString.
  • Conditional meta-data used by native-image is now generated automatically.

For more details on all the changes that went into this release please check our issue tracker.

To make it easier to experiment with netty 5 while still use 4.1 at the same time, we have put Netty 5 into its own io.netty5 package. This allows to have both version co-exist at the same time. As this a new major version we also started to introduce breaking changes where it makes sense. These changes were mostly motivation by lessons learned during the life-time of netty 4.1.x. We really hope you enjoy these changes and if not provide feedback in what we should address :)

We will soon start to change the default branch of netty to main and so be more strict about changes that will be accepted for 4.1. While this might sound like a "limitation" it will help to keep the possibility of a regression to a minimum for 4.1. Important bugfixes will of course still be ported to 4.1 as well. With all this said we don't plan to stop supporting 4.1.x any time soon. Both versions will be supported in parallel for now.

To help users to try the next major version of netty we started to write down all the "required" things to do in terms of migrating netty 4.1.x code to 5.0.0. The migration guide can be found on our website.