Eclipse Vert.x 4 milestone 1 released!

We are extremely pleased to announce the first 4.0 milestone release of Eclipse Vert.x .

Vert.x 4 is the evolution of the Vert.x 3.x series that will bring key features to Vert.x.

This release aims to provide a reliable distribution of the current development of Vert.x 4 for people that want to try it and provide feedback.

Core futurisation

Vert.x 4 extends the 3.x callback asynchronous model to a future/callback hybrid model.

public interface NetClient {
 
  // Since 3.0
  void connect(int port, String host, Handler<AsyncResult<NetSocket>> handler);
 
  // New in 4.0
  Future<NetSocket> connect(int port, String host);
}

In this first milestone, only the Vert.x Core library contains the hybrid model. More Vert.x components will be futurized soon and you will be able to try them in the next milestones.

Tracing

Instrumenting asynchronous application for distributed tracing is quite challenging because most tracing libraries rely on thread local storage. While it works reasonably well in a blocking application, this does not work for an asynchronous application.

This supposes that the application control flow matters (i.e threads) although what really matters is the application request flow (e.g the incoming HTTP request).

We improved Vert.x 4 to reify the request flow, making it possible to integrate popular tracing tools such as Zipkin or Opentracing. Vert.x performance is legendary and we made sure that this does not have any overhead out of the box (disabled).

We provide support for these two popular libraries under the Vert.x Tracing umbrella.

Other changes

Groovy has been simplified in Vert.x 4 to remove code generation that was not really needed in practice
The original Redis client deprecated in 3.7 has been removed replaced by the new Redis client
The following components have reached their end of life and have been pruned
- MySQL / PostgreSQL async client replaced by the Vert.x SQL Client (since 3.8)
- AMQP bridge replaced by the Vert.x AMQP Client (since 3.7)

Ramping up to Vert.x 4

Instead of developing all new features exclusively in Vert.x 4, we introduce some of these features in the 3.x branch so the community can benefit from them. The Vert.x 4 development focus on more fundamental changes that cannot be done in the 3.x series.

Screenshot

This is the first milestone of Vert.x 4, we aim to release Vert.x 4 by the end of this year and you can of course expect more milestones to outline the progress of the effort.