Netty4channelhandler执行顺序、事件传递过程

An inbound event is handled by the inbound handlers in the bottom-up direction as shown on the left side of the diagram. An inbound handler usually handles the inbound data generated by the I/O thread on the bottom of the diagram. The inbound data is often read from a remote peer via the actual input operation such as
SocketChannel.read(ByteBuffer). If an inbound event goes beyond the top inbound handler, it is discarded silently, or logged if it needs your attention.

An outbound event is handled by the outbound handler in the top-down direction as shown on the right side of the diagram. An outbound handler usually generates or transforms the outbound traffic such as write requests. If an outbound event goes beyond the bottom outbound handler, it is handled by an I/O thread associated with the Channel. The I/O thread often performs the actual output operation such as SocketChannel.write(ByteBuffer).

For example, let us assume that we created the following pipeline:

 ChannelPipeline p = ...;
 p.addLast("1", new InboundHandlerA());
 p.addLast("2", new InboundHandlerB());
 p.addLast("3", new OutboundHandlerA());
 p.addLast("4", new OutboundHandlerB());
 p.addLast("5", new InboundOutboundHandlerX());

In the example above, the class whose name starts with Inbound means it is an inbound handler. The class whose name starts with Outbound means it is a outbound handler.
In the given example configuration, the handler evaluation order is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 when an event goes inbound. When an event goes outbound, the order is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. On top of this principle, ChannelPipeline skips the evaluation of certain handlers to shorten the stack depth:

3 and 4 don't implement ChannelInboundHandler, and therefore the actual evaluation order of an inbound event will be: 1, 2, and 5.
1 and 2 don't implement ChannelOutboundHandler, and therefore the actual evaluation order of a outbound event will be: 5, 4, and 3.
If 5 implements both ChannelInboundHandler and ChannelOutboundHandler, the evaluation order of an inbound and a outbound event could be 125 and 543 respectively.

参考来源：http://netty.io/4.1/api/index.html

总结：InboundHandler是按顺序传递，OutboundHandler是逆序传递。对于客户端而言，先发起请求后接收数据，所以先执行OutboundHandler再执行InboundHandler。

注意的是： 如ChannelInboundHandler之间的传递，通过调用 ctx.fireChannelRead(msg)，但是OutboundHandler调用这个会导致死循环！！