[chubbard]

Non-existant ecosystem is a harsh assessment especially given the massive amount of java code our there. Any jar file can be used so the Java ImageIO package can easily be leveraged. It's early on for this tool chain, but all you have to do is get a 3rd party jar file in the class path of the server, and you can directly call Java methods from Javascript.

importPackage(java.io); var file = new File('/blah/blah/blah.txt');

Other languages would be equally easy as well. It's burried, but here is some relevant information from the docs on integrating 3rd party libs:

-cp <path> The path on which to search for the main and any other resources used by the verticle. This is ignored if you are running an installed module. This defaults to . (current directory). If your verticle references other scripts, classes or other resources (e.g. jar files) then make sure these are on this path. The path can contain multiple path entries separated by : (colon). Each path entry can be an absolute or relative path to a directory containing scripts, or absolute or relative filenames for jar or zip files. An example path might be -cp classes:lib/otherscripts:jars/myjar.jar:jars/otherjar.jar Always use the path to reference any resources that your verticle requires. Please, do not put them on the system classpath as this can cause isolation issues between deployed verticles.

[tferris]

Thanks for the clarification.

Assumed I use this ImageIO package. Will it be nonblocking, concurrent and spread to all my cores automagically with Vert.x??

[spullara]

Since they are not limited by a single threaded VM, you would run those using the worker pools and communicate with them via an actor type model similar to erlang. So, modulo a small amount of verticle code to deploy your image processor, yes.

[simpsond]

Not automagically, but java has some really good tools for helping. See the http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurren... package. Check the Executors section and you can easily distribute work via threads to all your cores. In fact, vert.x is using netty, which makes heavy use of threads along with async IO. You can do both.