Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/1v4TPM6. Tim Fox discusses the design principles and motivation behind Vert.x and why the future is reactive. Filmed at qconlondon.com. Tim Fox has been doing software engineering for almost 18 years, and has spent the last 8 years exclusively working in open source. Tim is employed by Red Hat where he is the creator and project lead for Vert.x - the reactive, polyglot application platform.

1. @timfox
High performance reactive
applications with Vert.x
Tim Fox
Red Hat

2. Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations
/performance-reactive-vertx
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4. @timfox
Bio
• Employed By Red Hat to lead the Vert.x project
• Worked in open source exclusively for the past 9 years
• Some projects I've been involved with: Vert.x (creator), RabbitMQ,
HornetQ (creator), JBoss AS, Mobicents...

5. @timfox
Overview
• Lightweight, reactive, application platform
• Superficially similar to Node.js - but not a clone!
• Inspired also from Erlang/OTP
• Polyglot
• High performance (see latest TechEmpower benchmarks!)
• Simple but not simplistic

6. @timfox
Polyglot
Full implementation:
Almost there:

7. @timfox
Core Asychronous APIs
• Core is small and static
• TCP/SSL clients and servers
• HTTP/HTTPS clients and servers
• Websockets, SockJS
• File system
• Event bus
• DNS (new)
• UDP (new)
• etc

8. Why Asynchronous?
• Modern servers need to handle high levels of concurrency – web servers,
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websockets, IoT etc
• OS threads are still a precious resource
• Need to service many connections with small number of threads
• Blocked OS threads means they can't do other work

9. @timfox
Verticle
• Execution unit of Vert.x
• Can be written in any language
• Single threaded – less scope for race conditions
• Verticles communicate by message passing
• Hmmm.. sounds like the Actor Model?

10. Demo
@timfox

11. @timfox
Event Bus
• The nervous system of Vert.x
• Verticles send messages over the event bus
• Point to point. Publish/Subscribe. Request/Response
• Pass strings, buffers, primitive types or JSON
• JSON messages are preferred for structured data

12. Clustered Event Bus
• Lightweight peer-to-peer messaging system
• Connects multiple Vert.x JVM instances
• Applications are loosely coupled components distributed across your
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network
• No monolithic “application server”
• Cluster manager is pluggable, default is Hazelcast

13. Event bus in the Browser
• Event bus extends to client side JavaScript too
• Uses the same API on the client
• Powerful distributed event space spanning both client and server nodes
• Ideal for modern “real-time” web applications
• Use whatever client side toolkit you prefer
@timfox

14. Demo
@timfox

15. @timfox
Modules
• Modules encapsulate code and resources
• One or more modules per application
• Must include a mod.json descriptor file
• Modules contain zero or more verticles
• Can be runnable or non runnable
• Module class-loaders provide isolation

16. Demo
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17. @timfox
An ecosystem of modules
• Sharing modules encourages reuse
• Modules can be pushed to any Maven or Bintray repository
• Vert.x can resolve modules at build time or run time
• Encourage an ecosystem of modules
• Register your modules in the registry
• Modules are the lego bricks to create your application

18. @timfox
It's all about the modules
MongoDB
Redis
MySQL/PostgreSQL
SMTP
JDBC
Jersey
Promises
Guice
Spring
Vertigo
Metrics
Facebook
Yoke
Kafka
BSON
work-queue
NoDyn
GCM
SocketIO
Sessions
Via
RxJava

19. @timfox
Fat jars
• Build module into self contained "fat" executable jar
• Convenient for devops
• Fairly small overhead ~ 4.7 MB

20. Demo
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21. @timfox
High Availability
• Automatic failover of deployed modules
• Nodes can be logically grouped
• Network partition detection (quorum)

22. Demo
@timfox

23. @timfox
Developing with Vert.x
• Vert.x is IDE and build system agnostic
• Can just use a text editor if you like
• Maven archetype
• Gradle template
• Debug and test in IDE
• Module auto-redeploy during development

24. Demo
@timfox

25. Summary
• Write apps as set of loosely coupled components that live anywhere
@timfox
where you want
• Polyglot – use the language(s) you want
• Simple concurrency – wave goodbye to most race conditions
• Modules – a library of lego bricks to build apps with
• High availability
• Ease of development

26. @timfox
Project Info
• Independent Community Project
• The main project is an Eclipse Foundation project
• All code is on GitHub
• 100% open source (ASL 2.0 + Creative Commons)
• One of the most popular Java projects on GitHub

27. @timfox
Get involved!
• Loads more to do
• Very active and growing community
• Find us on GitHub
• Google group: vertx
• IRC channel: #vertx on freenode.net

28. @timfox
Q & A

29. Watch the video with slide synchronization on
InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/performance
-reactive-vertx