Hi all,

The app I'm working on needs to have some simple network comms in it.
I've got a basic thing going where every connection gets a thread, etc, and it
works ok with some simple IO.

But what I want is a bit of handshaking at the front (login, etc), then
broadcast of update events.

I'm thinking messages will look something like:

 [length] [typecode] [payload]

where
- length might be a 4 byte integer
- typecode might be 'S' for serialized java object, 'a' for a
 string, 'x' for xml etc

I'd like to use nio even though I probably won't need the scalability.

There *must* be some good ready-to-run code out there for a reactor pattern with
some basic protocol handling stuff, ready to go, out of the box.

Some googling turned up lots of echo servers, but nothing a bit higher level
like this. This would be a bit like the python 'twisted' package but for Java.

Any tips warmly appreciated :)

Andrew