Eclipse Vert.x and reactive in just a few words

Eclipse Vert.x is a tool-​kit for build­ing re­ac­tive ap­pli­ca­tions on the JVM. Re­ac­tive ap­pli­ca­tions are both scal­able as work­loads grow, and re­silient when fail­ures arise. A re­ac­tive ap­pli­ca­tion is re­spon­sive as it keeps la­tency under con­trol by mak­ing ef­fi­cient usage of sys­tem re­sources, and by pro­tect­ing it­self from er­rors.

Vert.x is backed by a large ecosys­tem of re­ac­tive mod­ules with just any­thing you need when writ­ing mod­ern ser­vices: a com­pre­hen­sive web stack, re­ac­tive data­base dri­vers, mes­sag­ing, event streams, clus­ter­ing, met­rics, dis­trib­uted trac­ing and more.

Vert.x is a tool-​kit and not a frame­work that ships with black magic: what you write is ac­tu­ally what you get to ex­e­cute, as sim­ple as that.

So what makes Vert.x a great op­tion for writ­ing your next cloud-​native or twelve-​factor app?

In the beginning, there were threads…

The clas­sic ap­proach to con­cur­rency is to use threads. Mul­ti­ple threads can live within a sin­gle process, per­form con­cur­rent work, and share the same mem­ory space.

Most ap­pli­ca­tion and ser­vice de­vel­op­ment frame­works are based on multi-​threading. On the sur­face, the model of hav­ing 1 thread per con­nec­tion is re­as­sur­ing be­cause de­vel­op­ers can rely on tra­di­tional im­per­a­tive style code.

This is fine, es­pe­cially if you for­get about those silly mis­takes you can make with multi-​threading and mem­ory ac­cess …

Multi-threading is “simple” but limited

What hap­pens as the work­load grows be­yond mod­er­ate work­loads? (see the C10k prob­lem)

The an­swer is sim­ple: you start mak­ing your op­er­at­ing sys­tem ker­nel suf­fer be­cause there is too much con­text switch­ing work with in-​flight re­quests.

Some of your threads will be blocked be­cause they are wait­ing on I/O op­er­a­tions to com­plete, some will be ready to han­dle I/O re­sults, and some will be in the mid­dle of doing CPU-​intensive tasks.

Mod­ern ker­nels have very good sched­ulers, but you can­not ex­pect them to deal with 50 000 threads as eas­ily as they would do with 5 000. Also, threads aren’t cheap: cre­at­ing a thread takes a few mil­lisec­onds, and a new thread eats about 1MB of mem­ory.

Asynchronous programming: scalability and resource efficiency

Pro­cess­ing more con­cur­rent con­nec­tions with less threads is pos­si­ble when you use asyn­chro­nous I/O. In­stead of block­ing a thread when an I/O op­er­a­tion oc­curs, we move on to an­other task which is ready to progress, and re­sume the ini­tial task later when it is ready.

Vert.x mul­ti­plexes con­cur­rent work­loads using event loops.

Code that runs on event loops should not per­form block­ing I/O or lengthy pro­cess­ing. But don’t worry if you have such code: Vert.x has worker threads and APIs to process events back on an event loop.

Pick the best asynchronous programming model for your problem domain

We know that asyn­chro­nous pro­gram­ming re­quires more ef­forts. At the core of Vert.x, we sup­port call­backs and promises/fu­tures, the lat­ter being a sim­ple and el­e­gant model for chain­ing asyn­chro­nous op­er­a­tions.

Ad­vanced re­ac­tive pro­gram­ming is pos­si­ble with Rx­Java, and if you pre­fer some­thing closer to tra­di­tional im­per­a­tive pro­gram­ming, then we are happy to pro­vide you with first-​class sup­port of Kotlin corou­tines.

Vert.x sup­ports many asyn­chro­nous pro­gram­ming mod­els: choose what works best for each prob­lem you need to solve!

Don’t let failures ruin responsiveness

Fail­ures hap­pen all the time. A data­base will go down, the net­work will go down, or some ser­vice you de­pend on will be­come un­re­spon­sive.

Vert.x of­fers tools to keep la­tency under con­trol, in­clud­ing a sim­ple and ef­fi­cient cir­cuit breaker.

A rich ecosystem

The Eclipse Vert.x stack con­tains mod­ules for build­ing mod­ern, end-​to-end re­ac­tive ser­vices. From ef­fi­cient re­ac­tive data­base clients to event stream­ing, mes­sag­ing and web stacks, the Eclipse Vert.x project has you cov­ered:

Can’t find what you are look­ing for?

• The Re­ac­ti­verse is a larger com­mu­nity around the re­ac­tive ecosys­tems where you can find more client and mod­ules.
• The Vert.x Awe­some repos­i­tory pro­vides links to even more in­ter­est­ing projects from the larger open-​source com­mu­nity!

Ready to code?

Fol­low along with our get­ting started page!