Simple way to use Netty to build an http proxy server?

Question

I'm new to Netty, and am looking at using it to make a simple http proxy server that receives requests from a client, forwards the requests to another server, and then copies the response back to the response for the original request. One extra requirement is that I be able to support a timeout, so that if the proxied server takes too long to respond the proxy will respond by itself and close the connection to the proxied server.

I've already implemented such an application using Jetty, but with Jetty I need to use too many threads to keep inbound requests from getting blocked (this is a lightweight app that uses very little memory or cpu, but the latency of the proxied server is high enough that bursts in traffic cause either queueing in the proxy server, or require too many threads).

According to my understanding, I can use Netty to build a pipeline in which each stage performs a small amount of computation, then releases it's thread and waits until data is ready for the next stage in the pipeline to be executed.

My question is, is there a simple example of such an application? What I have so far is a simple modification of the server code for the basic Netty tutorial, but it lacks all support for a client. I saw the netty client tutorial, but am not sure how to mix code from the two to create a simple proxy app.

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    ChannelFactory factory =
            new NioServerSocketChannelFactory(
                    Executors.newCachedThreadPool(),
                    Executors.newCachedThreadPool());

    ServerBootstrap bootstrap = new ServerBootstrap(factory);

    bootstrap.setPipelineFactory(new ChannelPipelineFactory() {
        public ChannelPipeline getPipeline() {
            return Channels.pipeline(
                    new HttpRequestDecoder(),
                    new HttpResponseEncoder(),
                    /* 
                     * Is there something I can put here to make a
                     * request to another server asynchronously and
                     * copy the result to the response inside
                     * MySimpleChannelHandler?
                     */
                    new MySimpleChannelHandler()
                    );
        }
    });

    bootstrap.setOption("child.tcpNoDelay", true);
    bootstrap.setOption("child.keepAlive", true);

    bootstrap.bind(new InetSocketAddress(8080));
}

private static class MySimpleChannelHandler extends SimpleChannelHandler {

    @Override
    public void messageReceived(ChannelHandlerContext ctx, MessageEvent e) {
        HttpRequest request = (HttpRequest) e.getMessage();
        HttpResponse response = new DefaultHttpResponse(HttpVersion.HTTP_1_1, HttpResponseStatus.OK);
        response.setContent(request.getContent());

        Channel ch = e.getChannel();
        ChannelFuture f = ch.write(response);
        f.addListener(new ChannelFutureListener() {
            public void operationComplete(ChannelFuture future) {
                Channel ch = future.getChannel();
                ch.close();
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    public void exceptionCaught(ChannelHandlerContext ctx, ExceptionEvent e) {
        e.getCause().printStackTrace();

        Channel ch = e.getChannel();
        ch.close();
    }
}

Answer 1

you would have to look at LittleProxy to see how they did it as it is written on top of Netty.