Integrating WebSockets in Netty
comoyo.github.com
comoyo.github.com
For starters, IE has no support, though that is starting to change with IE10. But the biggest issue is with personal firewalls / corporate proxies. These are unfortunately quite horrible at handling Web Sockets. Many popular firewalls such as avast! and Bitdefender can’t handle the WS protocol and completely blocks traffic despite browser support and it being valid HTTP. The socket.io guys did some extensive research on what firewalls are causing these issues. I don’t think their list is exhaustive but it features most major personal firewalls out there. Have a look at https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/wiki/Socket.IO-and-f... , it's no reading of joy.
I’ve deployed quite large installations of Beaconpush (a push server incidentally based on Netty as well). First going from Web Sockets with fallback, over to pure WS and we’re looking at going back to using fallbacks once again due to these incompatibility issues. This time we are looking at using SockJS instead of rolling our own (to be fair, there were no open-source libs doing this when we started). I’ve ported SockJS to Netty (https://github.com/cgbystrom/sockjs-netty) and it’s working although I wouldn’t say it is production ready.
I urge you to have a look at SockJS and socket.io. Personally I prefer SockJS since it aims at emulating the Web Socket interface and nothing more as compared to socket.io (which adds a pub/sub layer). Also, it does not rely on a Flash fallback (which is another story). The socket.io guys are however working on engine.io, which will split the transport fallback mechanisms of socket.io to a separate library. That's a good idea, but it still uses Flash and IMHO a more complex "transport upgrade".
Perhaps folks that use it aren't the "blogger" kind.
I think this is a very positive trend towards more minimal software and more self-contained Java servers. Being able to ship (server) software as a single JAR file with everything you need embedded makes life a lot easier. It is very nice not having to fiddle around setting up servlet containers, configuring them, deploying applications into them and then, inevitably, having to restart everything when a rogue application decides to ruin the party for everyone. (And it just gets worse when you try to automate it).
One thing I'm still looking for is a good skeletal project for a REST server making use of JAX-RS annotations, Netty and having support for asynchronous request handling. Something that we could turn into a really skinny Maven archetype and teach new programmers to use.
(Obligatory disclosure and shameless plug: I work for Comoyo. If you find these things interesting/exciting and would like to come work for us feel free to contact us. We're hiring :) )
I used https://github.com/cgbystrom/jersey-netty for a one-off project wiring Jersey together with Netty. But it's not async :)