Apache MINA is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 network application framework

Application framework

In computer programming, an application framework consists of a software framework used by software developers to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific development environment ....

. MINA can be used to create scalable

Scalability

In electronics scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process, to handle growing amount of work in a graceful manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth...

, high performance network applications

Computer network

A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....

. MINA provides unified API's for various transports like TCP

Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...

, UDP

User Datagram Protocol

The User Datagram Protocol is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol network without requiring...

, serial communication

Serial communication

In telecommunication and computer science, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are sent as a whole, on a link with several parallel channels...

. It also makes it easy to make an implementation of custom transport type. MINA provides both high-level and low-level network APIs.

A user application interacts with MINA APIs, shielding the user application from low level I/O

I/O

I/O may refer to:* Input/output, a system of communication for information processing systems* Input-output model, an economic model of flow prediction between sectors...

 details. MINA internally uses I/O APIs to perform the actual I/O functions. This makes it easy for the users to concentrate on the application logic and leave the I/O handling to Apache MINA.

Advantages

• Unified APIs for various transports (TCP/UDP etc.)
• Provides high/low level APIs
• Customizable Thread Model
• Easy Unit Testing using Mock Objects
  Mock object
  In object-oriented programming, mock objects are simulated objects that mimic the behavior of real objects in controlled ways. A programmer typically creates a mock object to test the behavior of some other object, in much the same way that a car designer uses a crash test dummy to simulate the...
  
  
• Integration with DI frameworks like Spring, Google Guice
  Google Guice
  Google Guice is an open source software framework for the Java platform released by Google under an Apache license. It provides support for dependency injection using annotations to configure Java objects...
  
  , picocontainer
• JMX Manageability

See also

• Apache Camel
  Apache Camel
  Apache Camel is a rule-based routing and mediation engine which provides a Java object-based implementation of the Enterprise Integration Patterns using an API to configure routing and mediation rules...
  
  
• Enterprise messaging system
  Enterprise messaging system
  An enterprise messaging system is a set of published Enterprise-wide standards that allows organizations to send semantically precise messages between computer systems. EMS systems promote loosely coupled architectures that allow changes in the formats of messages to have minimum impact on...
  
  
• Message-oriented middleware
  Message-oriented middleware
  Message-oriented middleware is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple...
  
  
• Service-oriented architecture
  Service-oriented architecture
  In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
  
  
• Event-driven SOA
  Event-driven SOA
  Event-driven SOA is a form of service-oriented architecture , combining the intelligence and proactiveness of event-driven architecture with the organizational capabilities found in service offerings...