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Comment by fredliu | Hacker News Reader

Vert.x indeed looks pretty cool. But I found it a little bit weird that they used the term "reactive" in the title, but I'm not sure what the "reactive" is referring to: maybe Reactive Extensions, or at least RxJava? which should be perfect with vert.x to solve the callback hell problem. Or they just use it as a generic term for async technology used in vert.x/node.js/tornado etc?

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> But I found it a little bit weird that they used the term "reactive" in the title

"Reactive" is the new cool term that replaced "async" and "non-blocking" from a few years ago.

For maximum impact it is advised to combine it with microservices (or even unikernels) in the same sentence.

ah, thanks for the explanation... I guess we probably need a "new_cool_term" namespace for every new/re-purposed term. Simply use "reactive" to refer to "async" already caused a name collision for me here....

It's not a direct replacement for asynchronous, as reactive implies quite a different set of semantics. The collision is only in your misunderstanding of the pattern. The jargon is meaningful, not marketing.

Good to know. Then the "reactive" mentioned in the title is not exactly async, and not exactly as in "Reactive Extensions" either, so where can I find the intended meaning of "reactive" in that context?

Reactive is "things happen, I don't need to know, async".

Right?

And to completely blow everyone's mind, add 'dockerized'.

FWIW, "async" was called the "Reactor Pattern" in the Design Patterns world back in 2000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern

But "(a)ll reactor systems are single threaded by definition"...

So is what we know of as "async" and "non-blocking". The point is that instead of spinning up many blocking threads, a single select/poll/epoll() call triggers a set of callbacks.

I refuse to believe its a "Pattern" until I find a AsyncReactiveReactorFactoryFactory class.

Also add containers to the mix and have a promotion tomorrow

What's weirder is the fact that they used the name Vert.x, which sounds like "vertex" in my head, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with what this library is trying to accomplish.

"Vertex" is a synonym of "node" in graph theory, and the .x part emphasizes multi-language support (compare the .js "extension" in Node.js).

https://github.com/caniszczyk/vertx-proposal/blob/master/pro...

wow, now I understand why it's named like that: a polygot "node"!

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