After some previous 3.2.0 ALPHA releases, this is the first 3.2.0 BETA release. It comes with some new features and some improvements.
The Netty 3.2.0 ALPHA3 already came with Web Sockets support and now the BETA also contains the zero-copy file transfer feature. It also contains a more user-friendly API ( 3.1 deprecated methods are removed ) and it has a higher performance.

About the netty project:
The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework and tools for rapid development of maintainable, high-performance, high-scalability protocol server and clients. 

What the future will bring:
Since the HTTP tunneling transport has been rescheduled to the next major feature release (3.3), all planned features have been implemented. Unless there is a critical issue, they will proceed to release candidate phase.

For more information, click here