Introducing a new comer to the Vert.X Community

Vert.X community, project and my experience

What kind of people participate in your community ?

Everybody can be part of the community. You just need some basic programming skills and the will to be part and contribute with others. I (writing this blog) am from Africa (Cameroon) and my mentor is from Netherlands. This is just a mini example to show you people from every part of the world can be part of the Eclipse vert.X community.

What problem is your community trying to solve ?

Vert.x is a polyglot web framework that shares common functionalities among its supported languages Java, Kotlin, Scala, Ruby, and Javascript. Regardless of language, Vert.x operates on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Being modular and lightweight, it is geared toward microservices development. 

It's an opensource community. It's principal goal is to create tools in the different technologies mentioned to ease developers' work and make them more efficient.

Of the many projects carried out by the community the one I work on for my internship is Vert.x-eventbus-bridge.

Why would people want to use your project ?

Developers develop interest in the Vert.X framework because ...

What new terms or concepts have you learned in the past month ?

Working on this project introduced me to webRTC (Web Real Time Communication). At its basic it is the a technology that enables to browsers to communicate with each other without passing through a third party server. Of course to establish the initial communication between the web browsers, the server is needed. This server is usually referred to as the signaling server. 

With WebRTC, you can add real-time communication capabilities to your application that works on top of an open standard. It supports video, voice, and generic data to be sent between peers, allowing developers to build powerful voice- and video-communication solutions. The technology is available on all modern browsers as well as on native clients for all major platforms. The technologies behind WebRTC are implemented as an open web standard and available as regular JavaScript APIs in all major browsers. For native clients, like Android and iOS applications, a library is available that provides the same functionality. The WebRTC project is open-source and supported by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, amongst others. This page is maintained by the Google WebRTC team.  You can read more on webRTC here

What makes you most excited to work on your project ?

What makes me excited about this project is that I am learning a new technology (new both to me and the tech space as well). It's really a plus to have browsers communicate directly between them. This clearly removes an additional step thus increasing performance. For this reason I think webRTC could be the future of web communication or at the very least get its own share of the market. Being versed with it early puts me in a good position when it becomes a lot more popular.

What was confusing to you about the project ?

What makes me most confused about the project is concepts of STUN and TURN servers and network problems they solve as I am not too versed with network and networking concepts. Not really much of an issue though, u can comfortably start working on the project. But, if you are a perfectionist like me you will always feel you are lacking when there is some slight thing you don't know about the project or a technology (which in my experience its more of a weakness than a strength). I recommend if you are interested really just get started These concepts can be understood later.

Thanks for reading :)