Vert.x has something called a 'worker verticle' that can run blocking IO in a thread pool. You'd communicate with the worker by passing messages on the event bu

Vert.x has something called a 'worker verticle' that can run blocking IO in a thread pool. You'd communicate with the worker by passing messages on the event bus asynchronously. It makes integrating those kind of services fairly straight forward, but obviously you'd switch to actual async APIs if available.