Netty dynamic pipeline configuration

Question

This may be a "newb" question but here it goes anyway. We have a netty server up and running and we want it to support multiple different protocols like straight tcp, http, udp etc.. I am trying to write a class to be more dynamic what handlers/decoders/encoders we add to the pipeline on every request so we only add the layers we need depending on what type of traffic it is. I've got straight tcp figured out because we are encoding special bytes but I'm having a hard time coming up with a clever way to tell if its HTTP traffic vs straight tcp based off a ChannelBuffer or byte array.

My thoughts have been along the line of reading in some bytes and looking for a string like 'GET' or 'POST', I assume a HTTPRequest would have these items somewhere.. Is what I'm trying to do worth it? Or anyone have any helpful ideas?

Answer 1

I think you want to have a look at the portunification example where we do something like what you want to do. In short it's possible to do what you want. For more infos and more details please check the example at [1].

[1.a (master_deprecated)] https://github.com/netty/netty/blob/master_deprecated/example/src/main/java/io/netty/example/portunification/PortUnificationServerHandler.java

[1.b (4.1)] https://github.com/netty/netty/blob/4.1/example/src/main/java/io/netty/example/portunification/PortUnificationServerHandler.java