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.

What’s impressive about Netty in Action is not only that it is written by the key contributor who knows every single bit of Netty, but that it also contains case studies from several companies—Twitter, Facebook, and Firebase to name a few—that use Netty in their production systems. I’m confident that these case studies will inspire you by showing you how the companies that use them were able to unleash the power of their Netty-based applications.

You might be astonished to learn that Netty started as my personal project back in 2001 when I was an undergraduate student (http://t.motd.kr/ko/archives/1930), and that the project is still alive and kicking today, thanks to enthusiastic contributors like Norman, who spent many sleepless nights devoted to the project, (http://netty.io/community.html). I hope this book opens up another aspect of the project by inspiring its readers to contribute and continue to “open the future of network programming.”

TRUSTIN LEE

FOUNDER OF NETTY