Upgrade to airbase 17
[maven-release-plugin] prepare release 0.4
[maven-release-plugin] prepare for next development iteration
Add appendByte to SliceOutput
Add testing assertion utility
Add Slices.copyOf
[maven-release-plugin] prepare release 0.5
[maven-release-plugin] prepare for next development iteration
Remove unnecessary final
Replace toUnsafeSlice with Slices.wrappedBuffer
Add convenience method Slices.allocateDirect
Extract JvmUtils
Add ByteArrays for reading from byte arrays
Reorder methods
Move string decoding to private utility class
Update to latest airbase
Make toByteByffer public

Add method to convert the whole slice into a ByteBuffer
Implement read and skip methods in BasicSliceInput

The default implementations of these methods is very slow.
Add copySlice to DynamicSliceOutput

When reusing an DynamicSliceOutput with the reset method, the data must be
coppied before writing the new data.  This method makes the copy easy
Add method to wrap a byte array with an offset and length