Develop with VertX

@carlogilmar

This was a post writted for Making Devs Blog.

Recently we use the project Vertx for develop a project. Now I’m going to talk about the basic functionality.

VertX is a tool-kit for building reactive applications on the JVM.

It has many interesting features:

Actor model based.
It’s polyglot: you can use with Java, Groovy, Ruby, Scala, Ceylon, Javascript, and Kotlin.

Verticles

For the beginning it’s important know that VertX has a nervous system called Event Bus, where you can write and run Verticles.

Verticles are chunks of code that get deployed and run by Vert.x.

In groovy, a verticle is called consumer.

Every verticle have an identifier, it’s only a String. It could be deployed on a script or a class, and into him you can receive a message from another part of the Event Bus, and send a reply.

A Vertx Verticle:

Run on the event bus.
Have a address identifier (string)
Have a deployment ID (deployment identifier)
- It can receive a message and send a reply to the same message
- It can send message for other verticles
A simple groovy consumer:


	vertx.eventBus().consumer( "com.makingdevs.my.first.verticle" ){ message ->

	String deploymentId = vertx.getOrCreateContext().deploymentID

	println "This consumer has this deployment ID ${deploymentId})"
	println "The message received by this verticle is ${message.body}"

	}

	vertx.eventBus().send("com.makingdevs.my.first.verticle", "== Hello Vertx! ==")

view raw verticle.groovy hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Deploy Verticles

The verticles can be deployed for be available on the event bus. When a verticle be deployed, it will be available on the Event Bus. You can deploy one consumer, or N instances of the same consumer.

Sending Messages

You can send messages to verticle trough the verticle’s address. And it could be point to point, or a broadcast. With this simple concepts we can make a simple design using VertX verticles.

Ping-Pong simple example.

	vertx.eventBus().consumer("com.makingdevs.ping"){ message ->
	println "Message Received: ${message.body()}" // Pong!
	message.reply("ping")
	}

	vertx.eventBus().send("com.makingdevs.ping", "pong"){ reply ->
	if(reply.suceeded()){
	println "Reply Received: ${reply.result().body()}" // Ping!
	}
	}

view raw pingpong.groovy hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This are only the basics concepts of VertX, because this toolkit is much bigger and useful.

You can learn more on VertX site Vertx Site

Visit the [ VertX Google Group ] (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vertx)

Thanks for reading.

@carlogilmar