What is the difference between Vert.x and Netty?

Question

What is the difference between Vert.x and Netty? Why should one ever prefer Netty over Vert.x?

Both of them are event-driven, non-blocking and asynchronous frameworks designed for high-load I/O.

Vert.x is based on Multi-Reactor pattern (Node's style event loop on multithreaded JVM) but Netty use Interceptor Chain Pattern. When Interceptor Chain Pattern has any benefits over Multi-Reactor pattern ?

I just have a quick look at Netty's documentation, but it seems Vert.x has some extra funcitonality over Netty. I.e. Vertx is a standalone server, it's a polyglot, provide HA and clustering out-of-the-box.

Also Vert.x has little bit better benchmarks than Netty.

P.S. Disclaimer - I appreciate Vert.x very much, and not familiar with Netty. So by asking Why should one ever prefer Netty over Vert.x? I just trying to compare both of them.

On a related question there is a link to an interesting read on some finer details on netty and vertx at tech.kinja.com/ http://tech.kinja.com/interview-with-norman-maurer-netty-vert-x-1119968136 ref https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23780059/how-does-vert-x-achieve-superior-performance-compared-to-netty — MikeRoger, Aug 02 '17 at 08:26

score 46 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 20 '17 at 12:48

The difference is Vert.x is based on Netty. If you take a peek at the pom.xml in vertx-core you'll find:

<!-- We depend on the specific Netty dependencies not netty-all to reduce the size of fatjars -->
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-common</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-buffer</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-transport</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-handler</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-handler-proxy</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-codec-http</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-codec-http2</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-resolver</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
  <artifactId>netty-resolver-dns</artifactId>
  <version>${netty.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
  <version>${jackson.version}</version>
</dependency>

And the Netty version for Vert.x 3.5.0-SNAPSHOT is: 4.1.8.Final

Vert.x is an entire toolkit and ecosystem of pluggable modules on top of Netty for building reactive applications on top of the JVM.

What is the difference between Vert.x and Netty?

1 Answers1