Motivation:
While the default thread model provided by Netty is reasonable enough for most applications, some users might have a special requirement for the thread model. Here are a few examples:
- A user might want to invoke handlers from the caller thread directly, assuming that his or her application is completely asynchronous and does not make any invocation from non-I/O thread. In this case, the default invoker implementation will only add the overhead of checking if the current thread is an I/O thread or not.
- A user might want to invoke handlers from different threads depending on the type of events flexibly.
Modifications:
- Backport 132af3a485015ff912bd567a47881814d2ce1828 which is a fix for #1912
- Add a new interface called 'ChannelHandlerInvoker' that performs the invocation of event handler methods.
- Add pipeline manipulation methods that accept ChannelHandlerInvoker
- The differences from the original commit:
- Separated the irrelevant changes out
- Channel.eventLoop is null until the registration is complete in this branch, so Channel.Unsafe.invoker() doesn't work before registration.
- Deregistration is not gone in this branch, so the methods related with deregistration were added to ChannelHandlerInvoker