Your First Vert.x Application

• Create Vertx Instance
• Creating a Verticle
• Deploying a Verticle
• What is Next?

Once you have installed Vert.x you are ready to create your first Vert.x application. This tutorial will take you through creating your first Vert.x application step by step.

Create Vertx Instance

The first step to using Vert.x embedded in your own Java application is to create a Vertx instance. Here is how you create a Vertx instance:

import io.vertx.core.Vertx;

public class VertxApp {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Vertx vertx = Vertx.vertx();
    }

}

You create a Vertx instance by calling Vertx.vertx().

The Vertx instance creates a number of threads internally to handle the exchange of messages between verticles. These threads are not daemon threads, so they prevent the JVM from shutting down, even if the main thread creating the Vertx instance terminates.

Creating a Verticle

The Vertx instance by itself doesn't do much except all the thread management, creating an event bus etc. which are all communication and infrastructure tasks. In order to get the application to do something useful, you need to deploy one or more verticles (component) inside the Vertx instance.

Before you can deploy a verticle you need to create it. You do so by creating a class that extends AbstractVerticle. Here is a verticle example:

package examples.vertx;

import io.vertx.core.AbstractVerticle;
import io.vertx.core.Future;

public class MyVerticle extends AbstractVerticle {

    @Override
    public void start(Future<Void> startFuture) {
        System.out.println("MyVerticle started!");
    }

    @Override
    public void stop(Future stopFuture) throws Exception {
        System.out.println("MyVerticle stopped!");
    }

}

A verticle has a start() and a stop() method which are called when the verticle is deployed and when it is undeployed. You should perform any necessary initialization work inside the start() method, and any necessary cleanup work inside the stop() method.

Deploying a Verticle

Once you have created a verticle you need to deploy it to the Vertx instance. You deploy a verticle using one of the deployVerticle() methods on the Vertx instance. Here is a Vert.x verticle deployment example:

import io.vertx.core.Vertx;

public class VertxVerticleMain {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Vertx vertx = Vertx.vertx();

        vertx.deployVerticle(new MyVerticle());
    }
}

The verticle is deployed using this method call:

vertx.deployVerticle(new MyVerticle());

This method call deploys the MyVerticle instance passed as parameter to the deployVerticle() method.

The Vertx instance has another deployVerticle() method which takes the fully qualified class name of the verticle to deploy as parameter. Here is how deploying the MyVerticle using that method would look:

vertx.deployVerticle("examples.vertx.MyVerticle");

There are more options available for deploying verticles. For instance, you can specify how many verticle instances of a given verticle class to deploy. All that will be covered in later texts.

What is Next?

Once you know how to create a Vertx instance and know how to deploy verticles, you are ready to start playing around with the various parts of Vert.x . Each part will be covered in later texts in this tutorial trail.