front matter
I first ran across Vert.x in 2014 when I was the CTO at jClarity, a start-up I’d co-founded with Ben Evans and Kirk Pepperdine. We were building a SaaS that needed to receive large amounts of telemetry data, run analytics over it, and then present tuning recommendations to the end-user. Our use case required non-blocking, asynchronous communication, multi-tenancy (cost savings!), the ability to talk to data stores, and decent support for secured WebSockets. It would need to be a distributed system that scaled. Enter Vert.x!
John Oliver, our Chief Scientist, discovered this flexible framework for building asynchronous applications. Vert.x could do it all. It had blazing performance, thanks to its Netty base, and it supported all other functional and non-functional requirements. Even better was that it was backed by a bunch of brilliant, humble, and friendly engineers, such as Julien Ponge, the author of this book.
Vert.x is deliberately a non-prescriptive framework, in that it doesn’t guide you down a narrow path like, say, Spring Boot does. It's more like a toolkit of high-quality tools that are designed to work together, but you have to decide how to integrate them. That's where this book becomes your indispensable guide.