# Netty Project

Netty is an asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients.

## Links

* [Web Site](http://netty.io/)
* [Downloads](http://netty.io/downloads.html)
* [Documentation](http://netty.io/wiki/)
* [@netty_project](https://twitter.com/netty_project)

## How to build

For the detailed information about building and developing Netty, please visit [the developer guide](http://netty.io/wiki/developer-guide.html).  This page only gives very basic information.

You require the following to build Netty:

* Latest stable [Oracle JDK 7](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/)
* Latest stable [Apache Maven](http://maven.apache.org/)
* If you are on Linux, you need [additional development packages](http://netty.io/wiki/native-transports.html) installed on your system, because you'll build the native transport.

Note that this is build-time requirement.  JDK 5 (for 3.x) or 6 (for 4.0+) is enough to run your Netty-based application.

## Branches to look

[The 'master' branch](https://github.com/netty/netty/tree/master) is where the development of the latest major version lives on.  The development of all other major versions takes place in each branch whose name is identical to its major version number.  For example, the development of 3.x and 4.x resides in [the branch '3'](https://github.com/netty/netty/tree/3) and [the branch '4'](https://github.com/netty/netty/tree/4) respectively.
