Foreword

There was a day when people believed that web application servers would let us forget about how we write HTTP or RPC servers. Unfortunately, this daydream did not last long. The amount of load and the pace of the functional changes we are dealing with continue to increase beyond the extent that a traditional three-tier architecture can afford, and we are being forced to split our application into many pieces and distribute them into a large cluster of machines.

Running such a large distributed system leads to two interesting problems—the cost of operation and latency. How many machines could we save if we improved the performance of a single node by 30%, or by more than 100%? How could we achieve minimal latency when a query from a web browser triggers dozens of internal remote procedure calls across many different machines?

In Netty in Action, the first-ever book about the Netty project, Norman Maurer, one of the key contributors to Netty, gives you the definitive answers to such questions by showing you how to build a high-performance and low-latency network application in Netty. By the time you get to the end of this book, you’ll be able to build every imaginable network application, from a lightweight HTTP server to a highly customized RPC server.