Interview with Norman Maurer

QCon: Can you tell me more of your goals for your talk?

Norman: I’m going to discuss how we are using Netty at Apple . For example, I really want people to understand the scale we are talking about, and how Java (using Netty) is handling our scalability needs. Netty really builds an abstraction that lets us do non-blocking-IO well.

I will provide deep information what you could encounter and how we solved these things within Netty. By the way, those changes have been committed upstream. So we aren’t just using Netty, but we are contributing back to the community as we work through new solutions.

QCon: Can you tell me some of the specifics you plan to discuss?

Norman: I won’t dive into details here, but I can tell you I will be discussing things like:

• How we dealt with memory allocation problems using a pool implementation in Netty
• Why we created a native JNI implementation for Netty as replacement of using Java NIO
• Some performance information and implementation details around our Netty’s SSLEngine implementation that use native code for max. performance

QCon: What type of audience are you expecting for your talk?

Norman: I am really expecting a more advanced audience for this talk. With that said, if you are familiar with issues around blocking/non-block IO and some network programming concepts, you will understand the context of this talk.