Growing ByteBuffer

Have a look at Mina IOBuffer https://mina.apache.org/mina-project/userguide/ch8-iobuffer/ch8-iobuffer.html which is a drop in replacement (it wraps the ByteBuffer)

However , I suggest you allocate more than you need and don't worry about it too much. If you allocate a buffer (esp a direct buffer) the OS gives it virtual memory but it only uses physical memory when its actually used. Virtual memory should be very cheap.

A ByteBuffer cannot really work this way, as its design concept is to be just a view of a specific array, which you may also have a direct reference to. It could not try to swap that array for a larger array without weirdness happening.

What you want to use is a DataOutput. The most convenient way is to use the (pre-release) Guava library:

ByteArrayDataOutput out = ByteStreams.newDataOutput();
out.write(someBytes);
out.writeInt(someInt);
// ...
return out.toByteArray();

But you could also create a DataOutputStream from a ByteArrayOutputStream manually, and just deal with the spurious IOExceptions by chaining them into AssertionErrors.

In order for asynchronous I/O to work, you must have continuous memory. In C you can attempt to re-alloc an array, but in Java you must allocate new memory. You could write to a ByteArrayOutputStream, and then convert it to a ByteBuffer at the time you are ready to send it. The downside is you are copying memory, and one of the keys to efficient IO is reducing the number of times memory is copied.