262
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What is Netty?

Netty is a NIO client server framework which enables quick and easy development of network applications such as protocol servers and clients. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server.
Netty is a tool in the Concurrency Frameworks category of a tech stack.
Netty is an open source tool with 33.5K GitHub stars and 16K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Netty's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Netty?

Companies
30 companies reportedly use Netty in their tech stacks, including Glovo, commercetools, and Appian.

Developers
212 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Netty.

Netty Integrations

Pros of Netty
9
High Performance
4
Easy to use
3
Just like it
1
Easy to learn
Decisions about Netty

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Netty in their tech stack.

Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 6 upvotes · 2.1M views

We use GraphQL for the communication between our Minecraft-Proxies/Load-Balancers and our global Minecraft-Orchestration-Service JCOverseer.

This connection proved to be especially challenging, as there were so many available options and very specific requirements and we tried our hardest to put as little complexity into this interface as possible.

Initially we considered designing our very own Netty based Packet-Protocol. While the performance of this approach probably would've been noteworthy, we would have had to write a lot of packets as the individual payloads would differ a lot and for the protocol specification a new project would've been needed, so we scrapped that idea.

Our second idea was to use a combination of Redis Key/Value store (in particular the ability to write whole, complex sets as the values of keys) for existing data, Redis Pub-Sub for the synchronization of new/changed/deleted data and a Vert.x based REST API for the mutation requests of the clients. While this would certainly have been possible, we decided against it, as redis offers no real other data types than strings and typing was important to us.

So we finally settled for GraphQL as it would allow us to define dynamic queries and mutations and additionally has subscriptions in store, so we would only need one component instead of three separate. The proxies register as subscribers to the server changes channel and fetch the current data set in advance. If they need to request changes, this is done through a mutation in GraphQL aswell.

The status of the invidiual servers is fetched through Docker healthchecks and a Docker client in the orchestration service, that subscribes to changed HEALTHINESS values in docker. If a service becomes unhealthy it is unregistered and synchronized through GraphQL. The healthcheck is comparable to a ping packet that expects a response in a given time frame.

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Netty Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Netty?
Jetty
Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.
Mina
Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Undertow
It is a flexible performant web server written in java, providing both blocking and non-blocking API’s based on NIO. It has a composition based architecture that allows you to build a web server by combining small single purpose handlers. The gives you the flexibility to choose between a full Java EE servlet 4.0 container, or a low level non-blocking handler, to anything in between.
Akka
Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.
See all alternatives

Netty's Followers
408 developers follow Netty to keep up with related blogs and decisions.