Netty vs Apache MINA

Question

They both provide roughly the same functionality. Which one should I choose to develop my high-performance TCP server? What are the pros & cons?

Reference links:

Answer 1

Update: Just use Netty. It is now a mature project with all the bells and whistles required for building protocol clients and servers. It has strong community with several active contributors backed by enterprises. It also has a book, 'Netty in Action'. It has been adopted by many many well-known companies and projects already. Unlike Netty, Apache MINA has been under maintenance mode since I left the project.

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MINA has more out-of-the-box features at the cost of complexity and relatively poor performance. Some of those features were integrated into the core too tightly to be removed even if they are not needed by a user. In Netty, I tried to address such design issues while retaining the known strengths of MINA.

Currently, most features available in MINA are also available in Netty. In my opinion, Netty has cleaner and more documented API since Netty is the result of trying to rebuild MINA from scratch and address the known issues. If you find that an essential feature is missing, please feel free to post your suggestion to the forum. I'd be glad to address your concern.

It is also important to note that Netty has faster development cycle. Simply, check out the release date of the recent releases. Also, you should consider that MINA team will proceed to a major rewrite, MINA 3, which means they will break the API compatibility completely.