Motivation:
To make it possible to experiment with alternative buffer implementations, we need a way to abstract away the concrete buffers used throughout most of the Netty pipelines, while still having a common currency for doing IO in the end.
Modification:
- Introduce an ByteBufConvertible interface, that allow arbitrary objects to convert themselves into ByteBuf objects.
- Every place in the code, where we did an instanceof check for ByteBuf, we now do an instanceof check for ByteBufConvertible.
- ByteBuf itself implements ByteBufConvertible, and returns itself from the asByteBuf method.
Result:
It is now possible to use Netty with alternative buffer implementations, as long as they can be converted to ByteBuf.
This has been verified elsewhere, with an alternative buffer implementation.
ec18aa8731