I see that you're using straight-up Netty as the http server. Why did you choose to take this path rather than use a servlet container (Jetty, Tomcat)? Are there performance advantages?
To what the author has said, I will add that in terms of performance, Netty is currently faster than the fastest production Servlet containers [1]. Presently, Undertow (the web server for the upcoming WildFly application server, which will have a Servlet container) is the only platform providing slightly faster request-processing performance. Until WildFly is production-ready, Resin is the highest-performance Servlet container I am aware of.
I wanted the minimal viable that worked and proved concept and direction of API and then build on it. And while Netty seems to be seriously good performance wise , I will most likely add a layer to allow use of any servlet container. The dependency on Netty is minimal. Basically only one file with is the Request handler.
[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7...