Undertow for Ninja Framework by Fizzed

Fizzed, Inc. (Follow on Twitter: @fizzed_inc)

Overview

Standalone implementation for the Ninja Framework using Undertow. Ninja-undertow does not use servlets under-the-hood -- therefore it bypasses a significant amount of code that Ninja's default Jetty-based standalone uses. Ninja-undertow is a drop-in replacement for Ninja's Jetty-based standalone.

Performance

Based on this benchmark ninja-undertow is 15.5% faster than ninja-jetty for standard GET requests and 7.6% faster than ninja-jetty for POST requests w/ JSON. Future optimizations and tuning should continue to wident the performance gap.

Benchmark results for ninja.undertow.NinjaUndertow
----------------------------------------------------
 threads: 50
requests: 50000
get_with_params benchmark: 2096 ms (23854.96/sec)
post_object_as_form benchmark: 2913 ms (17164.43/sec)
post_object_as_json benchmark: 2246 ms (22261.80/sec)

Benchmark results for ninja.standalone.NinjaJetty
----------------------------------------------------
 threads: 50
requests: 50000
get_with_params benchmark: 2521 ms (19833.40/sec)
post_object_as_form benchmark: 3098 ms (16139.44/sec)
post_object_as_json benchmark: 2402 ms (20815.99/sec)

Differences with ninja-standalone (jetty)?

Ninja-undertow passes all current Ninja unit tests except one. Ninja-undertow does not implement any of Ninja's async-machine-beta features (which Ninja will probably deprecate in a future release).

Ninja-undertow is compiled with Java 8, whereas Ninja supports Java 7+.

Usage

Ninja-undertow is on maven central. The version will always be the Ninja version it was compiled against + undertowN which represents the undertow build increment. As of Ninja v5.4.0, as long as you don't have ninja.standalone.NinjaJetty on your classpath, Ninja will automatically find ninja-undertow and use it for everything (maven-plugin, testing, standalone). So if you previously had a dependency on ninja-standalone, you'll want to make sure you are only pulling ninja-core and ninja-undertow.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.ninjaframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>ninja-core</artifactId>
    <version>5.7.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fizzed</groupId>
    <artifactId>ninja-undertow</artifactId>
    <version>5.7.0.undertow2</version>
</dependency>

Configuration

The following Ninja (conf/application.conf) properties are supported.

ninja.host = <address>

Host interface to bind undertow server to. "0.0.0.0" will bind to any address or "localhost" would bind to just the local interface.

ninja.port = <integer>

HTTP port to bind undertow server to. Any value greater than zero activates the HTTP server.

ninja.ssl.port = <integer>

HTTPS port to bind undertow server to. Any value greater than zero activates the HTTPS server. All Ninja ninja.ssl.* properties are supported for setting up the keystore and truststore.

undertow.tracing = <boolean>

If true then an undertow RequestDumpingHandler will be added to the request handling pipeline to log all requests and responses. Please note that this is an expensive feature and should only be enabled during development or in cases of troubleshooting in production. False by default.

undertow.http2 = <boolean>

If true then HTTP/2.0 will be activated for HTTP/HTTPS ports. Undertow v1.4.0+ does not require ALPN support like in previous versions. Please note that most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) only try h2 over HTTPS. Recent versions of curl support h2 over HTTP.

Demo and benchmark

This project uses Blaze for assisting with running sample apps. To run a demo:

java -jar blaze.jar demo

To run a benchmark

java -jar blaze.jar benchmark

The benchmark supports a number of system properties to run with various configurations. To run the benchmark against jetty:

java -jar blaze.jar benchmark -Dbm.server=jetty

To benchmark ssl:

java -jar blaze.jar benchmark -Dbm.ssl=true

To activate http/2.0 for undertow and ssl:

java -jar blaze.jar benchmark -Dbm.ssl=true -Dundertow.http2=true

Testing

Compile and test project by itself and install it

mvn test

Use Ninja's unit tests to verify. Install ninja-undertow followed by a Blaze script to clone Ninja's upstream git repo.

mvn install
java -jar blaze.jar cloneOrRebaseNinjaRepo

Then edit ninja's standalone module to include ninja-undertow. This means any other module in ninja that pulls in ninja-standalone will also have ninja-undertow.

nano ninja-upstream/ninja-standalone/pom.xml

Add the following as a dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fizzed</groupId>
    <artifactId>ninja-undertow</artifactId>
    <version><!-- replace with version in pom.xml --></version>
</dependency>

cd ninja-upstream
mvn test -Dninja.standalone.class=ninja.undertow.NinjaUndertow -DasyncMachineTests=false

That system property controls the underlying implementation that ninja creates for its own standalone instance. Results in NinjaUndertow entirely replacing every occurrence where NinjaJetty is used. Therefore, it taps into all the NinjaFramework unit tests :-)

License

Copyright (C) 2016 Fizzed, Inc.

This work is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for details.