Preview of a guide for Java developers

I could not at­tend the last Eclipse Vert.x com­mu­nity face-​to-face meet­ing last fall, but one item that was dis­cussed is the need for guides aimed at cer­tain types of de­vel­op­ers. One of my mis­sions as part of join­ing the team was to work on this and I’m very happy to share it with you today!

A gentle guide to asynchronous programming with Eclipse Vert.x for enterprise application developers

The guide is called “A gen­tle guide to asyn­chro­nous pro­gram­ming with Eclipse Vert.x for en­ter­prise ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ers” and it is an in­tro­duc­tion to asyn­chro­nous pro­gram­ming with Vert.x, pri­mar­ily aimed at de­vel­op­ers fa­mil­iar with main­stream non-​asynchronous web de­vel­op­ment frame­works and li­braries (e.g., Java EE, Spring).

Quot­ing the in­tro­duc­tion:

We will start from a wiki web ap­pli­ca­tion backed by a re­la­tional data­base and server-​side ren­der­ing of pages; then we will evolve the ap­pli­ca­tion through sev­eral steps until it be­comes a mod­ern single-​page ap­pli­ca­tion with “real-​time” web fea­tures. Along the way you will learn to:

1. De­sign a web ap­pli­ca­tion with server-​side ren­der­ing of pages through tem­plates, and using a re­la­tional data­base for per­sist­ing data.
2. Cleanly iso­late each tech­ni­cal com­po­nent as a reusable event pro­cess­ing unit called a ver­ti­cle.
3. Ex­tract Vert.x ser­vices for fa­cil­i­tat­ing the de­sign of ver­ti­cles that com­mu­ni­cate with each other seam­lessly both within the same JVM process or among dis­trib­uted nodes in a clus­ter.
4. Test­ing code with asyn­chro­nous op­er­a­tions.
5. In­te­grat­ing with third-​party ser­vices ex­pos­ing a HTTP/JSON web API.
6. Ex­pos­ing a HTTP/JSON web API.
7. Se­cur­ing and con­trol­ling ac­cess using HTTPS, user au­then­ti­ca­tion for web browser ses­sions and JWT to­kens for third-​party client ap­pli­ca­tions.
8. Refac­tor­ing some code to use re­ac­tive pro­gram­ming with the pop­u­lar Rx­Java li­brary and its Vert.x in­te­gra­tion.
9. Client-​side pro­gram­ming of a single-​page ap­pli­ca­tion with An­gu­larJS.
10. Real-​time web pro­gram­ming using the uni­fied Vert.x event bus in­te­gra­tion over SockJS.

The guide takes a grad­ual ap­proach by start­ing with a “quick and dirty” so­lu­tion, then refac­tor­ing it prop­erly, ex­pos­ing the core Vert.x con­cepts, adding fea­tures, and mov­ing from call­backs to Rx­Java.

We need your feedback!

The code is avail­able at https://github.com/vert-​x3/vertx-​guide-for-java-devs. You can re­port feed­back as Github is­sues to that repos­i­tory and even offer pull-​requests.

You can check it out from GitHub (the Asci­iDoc is being ren­dered fine from the repos­i­tory in­ter­face) or you can check out pre-​rendered HTML and PDF ver­sions that I am tem­porar­ily shar­ing and keep­ing up-​to-date from my Drop­box: https://www.drop­box.com/sh/ni9zn­fk­zlkl3q12/AABn-​OCi1CZfg­bT­zOU0jYQpJa?dl=0

Many thanks to Thomas Segis­mont and Julien Viet who con­tributed some parts, and also to the peo­ple who re­viewed it pri­vately.

As usual, we wel­come your feed­back!