Vert.X is a relatively light layer on top of Netty and it is quite nice to work with. Spring WebFlux is also built on top of Netty, and missing some benchmarks

Vert.X is a relatively light layer on top of Netty and it is quite nice to work with. Spring WebFlux is also built on top of Netty, and missing some benchmarks, but I have no reason to think it would perform poorly. Its very easy to use for anyone with Spring experience. The fastest frameworks are all nonblocking, like Express. They use streaming and reactive patterns, if it wasn't for Java's types everywhere some people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Vert.X using RxJava and Express. The main design difference is that JS does non-blocking on a single core vs Java which does thread-per-core. Basically, in Java you can scale out non-blocking across all cores and still share memory when you want to. If you don't want to deal with thread safety and non-blocking DropWizard performs quite well using traditional threads. Just saying, performance and easy of use are not always exclusive. Maybe Vert.X didn't exist back when you were using Netty but these days it would be unthinkable to use Netty itself, the abstraction Vert.X provides is far easier to use and you don't really lose any performance. Java's bad performance reputation is 90% due to old versions of Spring. Spring Boot has come a huge way, with performance maybe 100X better than Spring 4. Spring WebFlux takes this even farther with a Vert.X-like api, probably reaching near-Netty performance