Reactive applications often use HTTP because it is such a versatile protocol, and Vert.x offers comprehensive support for web technologies. The Vert.x web stack provides many tools for building web application backends. These include advanced routing, authentication, an HTTP client, and more. This chapter will guide you through exposing an HTTP API with JSON web tokens (JWT) for access control, making HTTP requests to other services, and building a reactive single-page application that connects to the HTTP API.
Note
This book does not cover the following noteworthy elements from the Vert.x web stack that are not needed to build the application in this part of the book: routing with regular expressions, cookies, server-side sessions, server-side template rendering, and cross-site request forgery protection. You can get more details about those topics in the official documentation at https://vertx.io/.