How does Grizzly fit in with Glassfish?

glassfish grizzly
sonicboom picture sonicboom · Jan 9, 2013 · Viewed 7.6k times · Source

I know Glassfish uses a component called Grizzly but I am unsure of to exactly what role Grizzly performs. I have read that it is a 'front-end' for Glassfish. Is this correct? What exactly does Grizzly do, say when a HTTP request comes in or a response is being send back, does it pass through Grizzly first? And if so, for what reason?

Answer

rlubke picture rlubke · Jan 10, 2013

Grizzly does all of the heavy NIO lifting on behalf of one or more of the different containers within GlassFish. It's much like the connector functionality of Tomcat. The Connectors do the network operations on behalf of the core web container.

In the case of HTTP, Grizzly is responsible for parsing and serializing HTTP request/responses. It also provides the infrastructure to allow Servlet Async support to function. In the case of EE7, Grizzly also provides the functionality necessary to support non-blocking I/O within Servlets.

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