Bookreview: Instant Vert.x

Last Year at the SBB Developer Day I was presenting a talk about Vert.x: asynchronous event-driven web-applications on the JVM.

Vert.x is a very interesting project that brings some fresh concepts to the JVM platform. At first glance Vert.x looks like a Node.js clone for the JVM. But there are differences: Vert.x can not (yet) offer the gigantic ecosystem of modules of Node.js, but it is certainly attractive for bringing a "Node.js-like" programming model to the proven and scalable JVM platform. With its distributed event bus and the concept of "worker verticles" Vert.x offers concepts that go beyond Node.js.

Packt Publishing sent me the Book "Instant Vert.x" for review.

Instant Vert.x is a short book (54 pages). As the name suggests, you can read it in "an instant" and it gets you bootstrapped into the world of Vert.x.

I liked the style of the book: it is short and concise and after reading it, you have a good overview over Vert.x as an application platform and the programming model that comes along with Vert.x.

However I have to note that the Vert.x project has a very nice online documentation. In my opinion the book goes not beyond the information that is also available online.

The advantage of the book is, that it structures the information in an easily digestible way that you can read in chunks offline. However I would have hoped for more "in-depth" information or some "best practices" how to use Vert.x in real projects.

If you have never heard of Vert.x, I can fully recommend "Instant Vert.x". If you have already played with Vert.x the book is probably not for you.

Myco 1.1.0 for iPhone

This week I released Myco 1.1.0 for the iPhone.

So far the App was more successful than we expected: In the last three months we had about 30'000 downloads of which about 5% were paid versions.

In the latest version we updated the library content. We have now 229 mushrooms in the library and we added two new classification attributes: 'edibility' and 'spore print'.

 

 

As a new feature we added a quiz that allows you to learn to identify mushrooms in a playful way:

This will be the last version for iOS6 the next version will support iOS7 only.

The Windows Phone edition of Myco supports the same features. Please tell us which additional features you would like to see in the future.