The latest release of Netty adds a contribution from the Twitter team to support the SPDY protocol. Netty is a high performance NIO client server framework, originally developed at JBoss. Among the protocols supported by Netty are HTTP, WebSockets and Google ProtoBuffers.
According to a recent announcement from Mark Nottingham, http/2.0 specification working group chair, SPDY has become a promising candidate to succeed the current HTTP transport implementations. Netty is among the first servers to implement SDPY support. Other implementations are the mod_spdy Module for Apache httpd, Erlang-spdy, and spdy server for node-js. The Ngnix team tweeted a month ago, that they are planning to bring SPDY support soon. On the client side, SPDY support has been built into Chrome since release 11, and will now also make its way into Firefox 11. Amazon Silk, running on the Kindle Fire, and Chrome for Android are also capable of speaking SPDY already.
As we reported 2 years ago, SPDY was created 2009 as Google proprietary protocol, but later open sourced. SPDY mitigates long round trip times by multiplexing multiple requests on a single TCP connection, rather than to open separate ones for each request. It brings initial support for true server push and enforces SSL encryption and compresses headers as well.
Besides the addition of SPDY, the 3.3.1 release fixed a regression with Android support introduced in 3.3.0 and reduced memory consumption of Zlib used for encoding and decoding.
Netty releases can be found at its download page, while the source code is available on github.
