# 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/)

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 versions takes place in each branch whose name is identical to `<majorVersion>.<minorVersion>`.  For example, the development of 3.9 and 4.0 resides in [the branch '3.9'](https://github.com/netty/netty/tree/3.9) and [the branch '4.0'](https://github.com/netty/netty/tree/4.0) respectively.
