Netty, the Java-based asynchronous event-driven network application framework, has added Google's SPDY protocol to its selection of protocols in its latest 3.3.1 release. SPDY is a replacement for HTTPS which is designed to make web-based connections faster by, for example, allowing multiple requests to be multiplexed into one connection. Google's Chrome already supports SPDY for some Google sites and the next version of Firefox will have SPDY support, though it will be disabled by default initially.

Netty, which already supports HTTP, WebSockets, SSL, Google's ProtoBuf and other connection protocols, has added a SPDY module that was contributed by Twitter. Other changes include a reduction in memory use by Zlib decoders and content compressors and a fix for a regression which made Netty incompatible with Android. A full list of changes is available.

The Apache 2.0 licensed Netty project, founded by Trustin Lee, was originally part of the JBoss.org community and became an independent project in November 2011. Version 3.3.0, which added WebSockets support to the framework, was then released in January 2012. The current version 3.3.1 is available for direct download, is available from the Maven central repository or can be cloned from the project's github repository.

(djwm)