The Apache Directory team has announced the release of MINA, a network application framework, version 0.8.

Apache MINA (Multipurpose Infrastructure for Network Applications) is a network application framework which helps users develop network applications easily by providing abstractions of network and protocol I/O layers.

The MINA project website includes resources such as a PDF introduction to MINA and an online tutorial, which includes implementation of the echo protocol, as well as an implementation of a "reverse echo" to show how MINA can process data.

Feture List:

• Unified and extensible API for various transport types (TCP and UDP)
• In-VM pipe communication
• Provides both low-level and high-level API
• Stream-based asynchronous I/O support
• Filter interface as an extension point; similar to Servlet filters
• SSL support via SSLFilter thanks to Java 5 SSLEngine
• Built-in thread pool
• Unit-test your protocol without network connection
• Smooth migration from Netty, a popular NIO framework

Changes since 0.7.4:

• StartTLS support
• Improved connection idleness notification
• Better support for connectionless transport types (e.g. Datagram)
• Prioritized session handling via a thread pool
• Changed the logging framework to SLF4J
• Several bug fixes

MINA is currently used by the Apache Directory project and other open source projects. Do you think you would use it? If so, where?

What I'd like to see is a framework like this that fully supports banwidth monitoring and throttling of sockets. For some reason that feature is almost always left out (and yet incredibly useful).

What I'd like to see is a framework like this that fully supports banwidth monitoring and throttling of sockets. For some reason that feature is almost always left out (and yet incredibly useful).

Hi Jesse,

I bet throttling will be supported in MINA 0.9.

Thanks. :)

Have you tried throttling using a protocol filter which closes new connections when they exceed a threshold limit? That should work .

Hi,

how does MINA differ from JBoss Remoting. To me, it seems, that both frameworks have the same purpose. What are the advantages of MINA, compared to JBoss Remoting? What are the shortcomings? Is there, for example, a callback mechanism in MINA, that allows clients to receive notifications from the server? Has anyone worked with these two frameworks and is able to share his/her experiences?

Regards,
    Dirk