Undertow

Since version 8.0 Undertow has been the web server component of Wildfly. If you are using Wildfly then you already have Undertow.

Undertow is built using maven, and is synced to maven central. Undertow provides three seperate artifacts:

In order to use Undertow in your maven projects just include the following section in your pom.xml, and set the undertow.version property to whatever version of Undertow you wish to use. Only the core artifact is required, if you are not using Servlet or JSR-356 then those artifacts are not required.

Undertow can also be directly downloaded from the maven repository.

Undertow depends on XNIO and JBoss Logging, which will need to be downloaded as well.

In order to get the most up to date code you can build Undertow yourself.

Prerequisites

Building Undertow is easy, just follow these steps:

The build should run all tests and complete without errors.

The builder API is accessed using the io.undertow.Undertow class. We will start by looking at a simple example:

The above example starts a simple server that returns Hello World to all requests. The server will listen on the localhost address on port 8080 until the server.stop() method is called. When requests arrive they will be handled by the first (and only) handler in the handler chain, which in this case simply sets a header and writes some content (more information on handlers can be found in the handlers guide).

The builder will try and pick sensible defaults for all performance related parameters such as number of threads and buffer sizes, however all these can be overridden directly using the builder. These options and their effects are detailed in the listeners guide, and will not be repeated here.

If you do not want to use the builder API then there are a few steps that you need to follow to create a server:

The code for HTTP, HTTPS and AJP listeners is shown below:

As you can see it is quite a bit more code than just using the builder, however it does provide some flexibility that the builder does not:

In most cases this level of control is not necessary, and it is better to simply use the builder API.

Undertow is based on XNIO. The XNIO project provides a thin abstraction layer over Java NIO. In particular it provides the following:

The XNIO worker manages both the IO threads, and a thread pool that can be used for blocking tasks. In general non-blocking handlers will run from withing an IO thread, while blocking tasks such as Servlet invocations will be dispatched to the worker thread pool.

IO threads run in a loop. This loop does three things:

XNIO provides a channel abstraction, that abstracts away the underlying transport. Channels are notified of events using the ChannelListener API, and do not have to deal with NIO interest OPs directly. At creation time channels are assigned an IO Thread. This is the thread that will be used to execute all ChannelListener invocations for the channel.

The concept of a listener in Undertow is basically the part of Undertow that handles incoming connections, and the underlying wire protocol. By default Undertow ships with 5 different listeners:

These listeners will generally do all IO in an IO thread using async IO. When a request has been fully parsed they will create a HttpServerExchange object populated with the request data and then hand this to the handler chain.

Connectors are tied to an XNIO worker. If multiple connectors are setup to invoke the same handler chain they may share a Worker, or they may have separate workers, depending on how they have been configured.

In general it should not matter to your application the type of connector that is in use, the exception being that not all connectors support all features. For example AJP does not support HTTP upgrade.

For more information on listeners see the listeners guide.

The main Undertow functionality is provided by io.undertow.server.HttpHandler instances. These handlers can be chained together to form a complete server.

The HttpHandler interface is quite simple:

Handlers are generally chained together by explicitly specifying the next handler at construction time, there is no pipeline concept, which means that a handler can pick the next handler to invoke based on the current request. A typical handler might look something like this:

Undertow listeners can be configured through the use of the org.xnio.Option class. In general options for XNIO that control connection and worker level behaviour are listed in org.xnio.Options. Undertow specific options that control connector level behaviour are listed in io.undertow.UndertowOptions.

All listeners are tied to an XNIO Worker instance. Usually there will only be a single worker instance that is shared between listeners, however it is possible to create a new worker for each listener.

The worker instance manages the listeners IO threads, and also the default blocking task thread pool. There are several main XNIO worker options that affect listener behaviour. These option can either be specified on the Undertow builder as worker options, or at worker creating time if you are bootstrapping a server manually. These options all reside on the org.xnio.Options class.

All listeners have a buffer pool, which is used to allocate pooled NIO ByteBuffer instances. These buffers are used for IO operations, and the buffer size has a big impact on application performance. For servers the ideal size is generally 16k, as this is usually the maximum amount of data that can be written out via a write() operation (depending on the network setting of the operating system). Smaller systems may want to use smaller buffers to save memory.

In some situations with blocking IO the buffer size will determine if a response is sent using chunked encoding or has a fixed content length. If a response fits completely in the buffer and flush() is not called then a content length can be set automatically.

In addition to the worker options the listeners take some other options that control server behaviour. These are all part of the io.undertow.UndertowOptions class. Some of of these only make sense for specific protocols. You can set options with the Undertow.Builder.setServerOption:

io.undertow.server.protocol.http.AlpnOpenListener

Note that the HTTP2 and SPDY connectors require the use of ALPN. Unfortunatly java does not provide a standard way of performing ALPN at this time, so it is necessary to run java with a 3rd party ALPN library on the boot class path. For more information see the Jetty ALPN documentation.

SPDY and HTTP2 should use the ALPN open listener to handle the ALPN protocol negotiation.

io.undertow.server.protocol.http.HttpOpenListener

The HTTP listener is the most commonly used listener type, and deals with HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1. It only takes one additional option.

io.undertow.server.protocol.ajp.AjpOpenListener

The AJP listener allows the use of the AJP protocol, as used by the apache modules mod_jk and mod_proxy_ajp. It is a binary protocol that is slightly more efficient protocol than HTTP, as some common strings are replaced by integers. If the front end load balancer supports it then it is recommended to use HTTP2 instead, as it is both a standard protocol and more efficient.

This listener has one specific option:

HTTP/2 support is implemented on top of HTTP/1.1 (it is not possible to have a HTTP/2 server that does not also support HTTP/1). There are three different ways a HTTP/2 connection can be established:

Depending on the way HTTP/2 is being used the setup for the listeners is slightly different.

If you are using the Undertow builder all that is required is to call setServerOption(ENABLE_HTTP2, true), and HTTP/2 support will be automatically added for all HTTP and HTTPS listeners.

The following options are supported:

io.undertow.server.protocol.spdy.SpdyOpenListener

The SPDY protocol is an experimental protocol designed by Google, that formed the basis of HTTP2. Now that HTTP2 has been adopted by browser vendors it should be used instead.

(This is also covered in the Request Lifecycle document.)

When a client connects to the server Undertow creates a io.undertow.server.HttpServerConnection. When the client sends a request it is parsed by the Undertow parser, and then the resulting io.undertow.server.HttpServerExchange is passed to the root handler. When the root handler finishes one of 4 things can happen:

By far the most common use of HttpServerExchange.dispatch() is to move execution from an IO thread where blocking is not allowed into a worker thread, which does allow for blocking operations. This pattern generally looks like:

Because exchange is not actually dispatched until the call stack returns you can be sure that more that one thread is never active in an exchange at once. The exchange is not thread safe, however it can be passed between multiple threads as long as both threads do not attempt to modify it at once, and there is a happens before action (such as a thread pool dispatch) in between the first and second thread access.

As mentioned above, and exchange is considered done once both the request and response channels have been closed and flushed.

There are two ways to end an exchange, either by fully reading the request channel, and calling shutdownWrites() on the response channel and then flushing it, or by calling HttpServerExchange.endExchange(). When endExchange() is called Undertow will check if and content has been generated yet, if it has then it will simply drain the request channel, and close and flush the response channel. If not and there are any default response listeners registered on the exchange then Undertow will give each of them a chance to generate a default response. This mechanism is how default error pages are generated.

As Undertow is based on NIO it uses java.nio.ByteBuffer whenever buffering is needed. These buffers are pooled, and should not be allocated on demand as this will severely impact performance. The buffer pool can be obtained by calling HttpServerConnection.getBufferPool().

Pooled buffers must be freed after use, as they will not be cleaned up by the garbage collector. The size of the buffers in the pool is configured when the server is created. Empirical testing has shown that if direct buffers are being used 16kb buffers are optimal if maximum performance is required (as this corresponds to the default socket buffer size on Linux).

By default Undertow uses non-blocking XNIO channels, and requests initially start off in an XNIO IO thread. These channels can be used directly to send a receive data. These channels are quite low level however, so to that end Undertow provides some abstractions to make using them a little bit easier.

The easiest way to send a response using non-blocking IO is to use the sender API as shown above. It contains several versions of the send() method for both byte and String data. Some versions of the method take a callback that is invoked when the send is complete, other versions do not take a callback and instead end the exchange when the send is complete.

Note that the sender API does not support queueing, you may not call send() again until after the callback has been notified.

When using versions of the send() method that do not take a callback the Content-Length header will be automatically set, otherwise you must set this yourself to avoid using chunked encoding.

The sender API also supports blocking IO, if the exchange has been put into blocking mode by invoking HttpServerExchange.startBlocking() then the Sender will send its data using the exchanges output stream.

Undertow provides full support for blocking IO. It is not advisable to use blocking IO in an XNIO worker thread, so you will need to make sure that the request has been dispatched to a worker thread pool before attempting to read or write.

The code to dispatch to a worker thread can be found above.

To begin blocking IO call HttpServerExchange.startBlocking(). There are two versions of this method, the one which does not take any parameters which will use Undertow’s default stream implementations, and HttpServerExchange.startBlocking(BlockingHttpServerExchange blockingExchange) which allows you to customise the streams that are in use. For example the servlet implementation uses the second method to replace Undertow’s default streams with Servlet(Input/Output)Stream implementations.

Once the exchange has been but into blocking mode you can now call HttpServerExchange.getInputStream() and HttpServerExchange.getOutputStream(), and write data to them as normal. You can also still use the sender API described above, however in this case the sender implementation will use blocking IO.

By default Undertow uses buffering streams, using buffers taken from the buffer pool. If a response is small enough to fit in the buffer then a Content-Length header will automatically be set.

Request and response headers are accessible through the HttpServerExchange.getRequestHeaders() and HttpServerExchange.getResponseHeaders() methods. These methods return a HeaderMap, an optimised map implementation.

Headers are written out with the HTTP response header when the first data is written to the underlying channel (this may not be the same time as the first time data is written if buffering is used).

If you wish to force the headers to be written you can call the flush() method on either the response channel or stream.

In order to perform a HTTP upgrade you can call HttpServerExchange.upgradeChannel(ExchangeCompletionListener upgradeCompleteListener), the response code will be set to 101, and once the exchange is complete your listener will be notified. Your handler is responsible for setting any appropriate headers that the upgrade client will be expecting.

The easiest way to handle exceptions is to catch them in an outer handler. For example:

The allows you application to handle exceptions in whatever manner you see fit.

If the exception propagates out of the handler chain a 500 response code will be set and the exchange can be ended.

Default response listener allow you to generate a default page if the exchange is ended without a response body. These handlers should test for an error response code, and then generate an appropriate error page.

Note that these handlers will be run for all requests that terminate with no content, but generating default content for successful requests will likely cause problems.

Default response listeners can be registered via the HttpServerExchange#addDefaultResponseListener(DefaultResponseListener) method. They will be called in the reverse order that they are registered, so the last handler registered is the first to be called.

The following example shows a handler that will generate a simple next based error page for 500 errors:

The core of Undertow’s security architecture is the SecurityContext. It is accessible via the HttpServerExchange.getSecurityContext() method. The security context is responsible for maintaining all security related state for the request, including configured authentication mechanisms and the current authenticated user.

Security within Undertow is implemented as a set of asynchronous handlers and a set of authentication mechanisms co-ordinated by these handlers.

Early in the call chain is a handler called SecurityInitialHandler, this is where the security processing beings, this handler ensures that an empty SecurityContext is set on the current HttpServerExchange

The SecurityContext is responsible for both holding the state related to the currently authenticated user and also for holding the configured mechanisms for authentication (AuthenticationMechanism) and providing methods to work with both of these. As this SecurityContext is replacable a general configuration can be applied to a complete server with custom configuration replacing it later in the call.

After the SecurityContext has been established subseqeunt handlers can then add authentication mechanisms to the context, to simplify this Undertow contains a handler called AuthenticationMechanismsHandler this handler can be created with a set of AuthenticationMechanism mechanisms and will set them all on the established SecurityContext. Alternatively custom handlers could be used to add mechanisms one at a time bases on alternative requirements.

The next handler in the authentication process is the AuthenticationConstraintHandler, this handler is responsible for checking the current request and identifying if authentication should be marked as being required for the current request. This handler can take a Predicate that makes a decision about if the request requires authentication.

The final handler in this chain is the AuthenticationCallHandler, this handler is responsible for ensuring the SecurityContext is called to actually perform the authentication process, depending on any identified constraint this will either mandate authentication or only perform authentication if appropriate for the configured mechanisms.

There is no requirement for these handlers to be executed consecutively, the only requirement is that first the SecurityContext is established, then the authentications and constrain check can be performed in any order and finally the AuthenticationCallHandler must be used before any processing of a potentially protected resource is called.

Security mechanisms that are to be used must implement the following interface: -

The AuthenticationMechanismOutcome is used by the mechanism to indicate the status of the attempted authentication.

The three options are:

Regardless of if authentication has been flagged as being required when the request reaches the AuthenticationCallHandler the SecurityContext is called to commence the process. The reason this happens regardless of if authentication is flagged as required is for a few reasons:

When authentication runs the authenticate method on each configured AuthenticationMechanism is called in turn, this continues until one of the following occurs:

At this point if the response was AUTHENTICATED then the request will be allowed through and passed onto the next handler.

If the request is NOT_AUTHENTICATED then either authentication failed or a mechanism requires an additional round trip with the client, either way the sendChallenge method of each defined AuthenticationMethod is called in turn and the response sent back to the client. All mechanisms are called as even if one mechanism is mid-authentication the client can still decide to abandon that mechanism and switch to an alternative mechanism so all challenges need to be re-sent.

If the list of mechanisms was exhausted then the previously set authentication constraint needs to be checked, if authentication was not required then the request can proceed to the next handler in the chain and that will be then of authentication for this request (unless a later handler mandates authentication and requests authentication is re-atempted). If however authentication was required then as with a NOT_AUTHENTICATED response each mechanism has sendChallenge called in turn to generate an authentication challenge to send to the client.

Predicates and Exchange attributes are an abstraction that allow handlers to read, write and make decisions based on certain attributes of a request without hard coding this into the handler. These form the basis of Undertow’s text based handler configuration format. Some examples are shown below:

Use the reverse proxy to send all requests to /reports to a different backend server:

Redirect all requests from /a to /b. The first example only redirects if there is an exact match, the later examples match all paths that start with /a:

An exchange attribute represents the value of part of the exchange. For example the path attribute represents the request path, the method attribute represents the HTTP. Even though these attributes can be retrieved and modified directly this requires a handler to hard code the attribute that they wish to use. For example Undertow provides a handler that checks an attribute against an access control list. There are lots of different attributes we may wish to check against the ACL (e.g. username, User-Agent header, request path).

A predicate is a function that takes a value (in this case the HttpServerExchange) and returns a true or false value. This allows actions to be taken based on the return value of the predicate. In general any handler that needs to make a boolean decision based on the exchange should use a predicate to allow for maximum flexibility.

The provided predicate handler can be used to make a decision between which handler to invoke based on the value of a predicate.

An exchange attribute is represented by the io.undertow.attribute.ExchangeAttribute interface:

Undertow provides implementation of a lot of attributes out of the box, most of which can be accessed using the io.undertow.attribute.ExchangeAttributes utility class. Some of the attributes that are provided include request and response headers, cookies, path, query parameters, the current user and more.

Predicates are represented by the io.undertow.predicate.Predicate interface:

Undertow provides built in predicates that can be created using the io.undertow.predicate.Predicates utility class. This includes basic boolean logic predicates (and, or and not), as well as other useful predicates such as path matching (including prefix and suffix based matches), regular expression matching, contains and exists. Many of these predicates operate on exchange attributes, so they can be used to match arbitrary parts of the exchange. The following example demonstrates a predicate that matches any exchange that has no Content-Type header where the method is POST:

All these attributes and predicates are all well and good, but unless there is a way for the end user to configure them without resorting to programmatic means they are not super useful. Fortunately Undertow provides a way to do just that.

Exchange attributes may have up to two textual representations, a long one and a short one. The long version takes the form %{attribute}, while the short version is a percent sign followed by a single character. A list of the built in attributes provided by Undertow is below:

Any tokens that do not follow one of the above patterns are assumed to be literals. For example assuming a user name of Stuart and a request method of GET the attribute text Hello %u the request method is %m will give the value Hello Stuart the request method is GET.

These attributes are used anywhere that text based configuration is required, e.g. specifying the log pattern in the access log.

Some handlers may actually modify these attributes. In order for this to work the attribute must not be read only, and must consist of only a single token from the above table.

Sometimes it is also useful to have a textual representation of a predicate. For examples when configuring a handler in Wildfly we may want it only to run if a certain condition is met, and when doing rewrite handling we generally do not want to re-write all requests, only a subset of them.

To this end Undertow provides a way to specify a textual representation of a predicate. In its simplest form, a predicate is represented as predicate-name[name1=value1,name2=value2].

For example, the following predicates all match POST requests:

Lets examine these a bit more closely. The first one method(POST) uses the built in method predicate that matches based on the method. As this predicate takes only a single parameter (that is the default parameter) it is not necessary to explicitly specify the parameter name. Also note that POST is not quoted, quoting is only necessary if the token contains spaces, commas or square braces.

The second example method(value=POST) is the same as the first, except that the parameter name is explicitly specified.

The third and fourth examples demonstrates the equals predicate. This predicate actually takes one parameter that is an array, and will return true if all items in the array are equal. Arrays are generally enclosed in curly braces, however in this case where there is a single parameter that is the default parameter the braces can be omitted.

The final examples shows the use of the regex predicate. This takes 3 parameters, the pattern to match, the value to match against and full-match, which determines if the pattern must match the whole value or simply part of it.

Some predicates may also capture additional information about the match and store it in the predicate context. For example the regex predicate will store the match under the key 0, and any match groups under the key 1, 2 etc.

These contextual values can then be retrieved by later predicates of handlers using the syntax ${0}, ${1} etc.

Predicates can be combined using the boolean operators and, or and not. Some examples are shown below:

The first predicate will match everything except post requests. The second will match all post requests to /uploads. The third predicate will match all requests to URL’s of the form /user/{username}/* where the username is equal to the username of the currently logged in user. In this case the username part of the URL is captured, and the equals handler can retrieve it using the ${username} syntax shown above. The fourth example is the same as the third, however it uses a regex with a match group rather than a path template.

The complete list of built in predicates is shown below:

Handlers are represented in a similar way to predicates. Handlers are predicates are combined into the Undertow predicate language.

The general form of this language is predicate -> handler. If the predicate evaluates to true the handler is executes. If there is only a handler present then the handler is always executed. Handlers are executed in order and separated by line breaks or semi colons. Curly braces can be used to create a sub grouping, with all handlers (and possibly predicates) in the sub grouping being executed. The else keyword can be used to execute a different handler or sub grouping if the predicate evaluates to false. Sub grouping can contain other predicates and sub groupings.

The restart handler is a special handler that will restart execution at the beginning of the predicated handler list. The done handler will skip any remaining rules.

Some examples are below:

Hander chain wrappers allow you to insert additional HttpHandlers into the Servlet chain, there are three methods that allow you to do this:

Thread setup actions can be added using the addThreadSetupAction() method, these actions will be run before a request is dispatched to a thread, so any thread local data can be setup.

The ResourceManager is used by the default servlet to serve all static resources. By modifying the resource manager in use it is possible to pick where static resource are served from.

The authentication mechanism to use is determined by the LoginConfig object. This maintains a list of mechanism names and the mechanisms will be tried in order.

In addition to the built in mechanisms it is possible to add custom authentication mechanisms using the addFirstAuthenticationMechanism() addLastAuthenticationMechanism() and addAuthenticationMechanism() methods.

The first and last versions of this method will both add a mechanism and add it to the LoginConfig object, while the addAuthenticationMechanism() simply registers a factory for the given mechanism name. If you are trying to create a general purpose authentication mechanism via a Servlet extension this is the method you should use, as it means you can install your extension into a server for all deployments, and it will only be active for deployments where the user has specifically selected your mechanism name in web.xml.

The deployment guide contains examples of how to use the DeploymentInfo API.

Using non-blocking handlers with Servlet deployments

Say we are serving up an application, and we decide that we would like to serve all our .js and .css files using an async handler, as we want to avoid the overhead of a servlet request.

To do this we are going to create a handler that checks the extension on the incoming request, and if it is .js or .css then it will serve the file directly, bypassing servlet all together.

Lets go through this line by line:

A resource handler is a handler provided by Undertow that serves resources from a resource manager. This is basically just an abstraction that allows us to re-use the file serving code no matter where a file in coming from. For example undertow provides several default resource manager implementations:

You do not need to worry about what type of resource manager is in use here, all you need to know is that this is the resource manager that is being used by the default servlet, so serving files from this resource manager will mirror the behaviour of the default servlet.

We now need to wire up our resource handler so it is only used for .js and .css. We could simply write a handler that checks the file extension and delegates accordingly, however Undertow already provides us with one:

A PredicateHandler chooses between two different handlers based on the result of a predicate that is applied to the exchange. In this case we are using a suffix predicate, that will return true if the request ends with .js or .css.

When this predicate returns true our resource handler will be invoked, otherwise the request will be delegated to the servlet container as normal.

Undertow provides full support for all security constructs specified in the Servlet specification. These are configured via the DeploymentInfo structure, and in general closely mirror the corresponding structures as defined by annotations or web.xml. These structures are not detailed fully here, but are covered by the relevant javadoc.

If you are using Wildfly then then it is possible to configure multiple mechanisms using web.xml, by listing the mechanism names separated by commas. It is also possible to set mechanism properties using a query string like syntax.

For example:

The mechanisms will be tried in the order that they are listed. In the example silent basic auth will be tried first, which is basic auth that only takes effect if an Authorization header is present. If no such header is present then form auth will be used instead. This will allow programatic clients to use basic auth, while users connecting via a browser can use form based auth.

The built it list of mechanisms and the properties they take are as follows:

The authentication mechanism is specified via the io.undertow.servlet.api.LoginConfig object that can be added using the method DeploymentInfo.setLoginConfig(LoginConfig config). This object contains an ordered list of mechanism names. The Servlet specification only allows you to specify a single mechanism name, while Undertow allows as many as you want (if you are using Wildfly you can make use of this by using a comma separated list of names in web.xml, and pass properties using a query string like syntax, for example BASIC?silent=true,FORM).

The mechanisms are standard Undertow AuthenticationMechanism implementations, and it should be noted that not all mechanisms are compatible. For example trying to combine FORM and BASIC does not work, just because they both require a different response code. Combining FORM and silent BASIC will work just fine however (silent basic auth means that if the user agent provides an Authorization: header then BASIC auth will be used, however if this header is not present then no action will be taken. This allows scripts to use basic auth, while browsers can use form).

When adding the mechanism name to the LoginConfig structure it is also possible to specify a property map. Custom authentication mechanisms may use these properties however they wish. The only built in mechanism that makes use of this mechanism is basic auth, which if passed Collections.singletonMap("silent", "true") will enable silent mode as described above.

The built in mechanisms are FORM, DIGEST, CLIENT_CERT and BASIC.

Custom authentication mechanisms are added using the Undertow ServletExtension mechanism. This provides a way to hook into the Undertow deployment process, and add any additional mechanisms.

These extensions are discovered via the standard META-INF/services discovery mechanism, so if you have a jar that provides a custom authentication mechanism all that should be required is to add this jar to your deployment and then specify the mechanism name in web.xml.

For more info see the Servlet extensions guide.

It is possible to insert customer handlers into various parts of the servlet handler chain. This is done by adding a io.undertow.server.HandlerWrapper to the DeploymentInfo structure. This will be called at deployment time and allows you to wrap the existing handler.

There are three possible places where a handler can be inserted:

To add a wrapper here use DeploymentInfo.addInnerHandlerChainWrapper(HandlerWrapper wrapper).

Thread setup actions allow you to perform tasks before and after control is dispatched to user code. The most common use for this is to set up thread local contexts. For example a server might want to setup the appropriate JNDI contexts before control is passed to user code, so make sure the code has access to the correct java:comp context.

Thread setup actions can be added using DeploymentInfo.addThreadSetupAction(ThreadSetupAction action).

In Servlet code it is common to see code that looks like this:

While this seems reasonable at first glace it is actually terrible from a performance point of view. The flush() call before the close() call forces content to be written to the client, which will generally force chunked encoding. The following close() call then writes out the chunk terminator, resulting in another write to the socket. This means that a response that could otherwise have been written out using a single write call using a fixed content length now takes two and uses chunked encoding.

To work around this poor practice Undertow provides an option to ignore flushes on the ServletOutputStream. This can be activated by calling DeploymentInfo.setIgnoreFlush(true). Even though flush() will no longer flush to the client when this is enabled Undertow will still treat the response as commited and not allow modification of the headers.

First you need to include the latest Undertow.js in your application. If you are using Wildfly 10 this is not necessary, as Wildfly 10 provides this functionality out of the box. If you are using maven you can include the following in your pom.xml :

Otherwise you can download the jars from link:http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.undertow.js/undertow-js .

Once you have Undertow.js you need to tell it where to find your javascript files. To do this we create a file WEB-INF/undertow-scripts.conf. In this file you list your server side JavaScript files, one per line. These files will be executed in the order specified.

Note that even though the server JavaScript files are located in the web context, the JavaScript integration will not allow them to be served. If a user requests a server side JS file a 404 will be returned instead.

We can now create a simple endpoint. Create a javascript file, add it to undertow-scripts.conf and add the following contents:

Accessing the /hello path inside your deployment should now return a Hello World response. Note that this path is relative to the context root, so if your deployment is example.war and your server is running on port 8080 the handler will be installed at http://localhost:8080/example/hello.

The $undertow global provides the main functionality of an Undertow.js application. When your scripts are executed they invoke methods on this object to register HTTP and Websocket handlers. Incoming requests for the application will be checked against these handlers, and if they match the relevant javascript will be run to handle the request. If there is no matches the request is forwarded to the Servlet container as normal.

If a file is modified and hot deployment is enabled the Nashorn engine is discarded, a new engine is created and all scripts are executed again to re-set up the handlers.

To register a handler for a HTTP endpoint you can use one of the following methods

onRequest takes the method name as a first parameter, otherwise its usage is the same as the others. These methods can accept a variable number of parameters.

Note that all methods on $undertow are fluent, they return the same object so they can be chained together.

There are a number of different forms that can be used to invoke these methods, they are all covered below.

This is the simplest usage, which consists of a path and a handler function to register under this path. Both the usages shown above are identical. Future examples will not show the onRequest version, as with the exception of the method name it is identical.

The example above shows the use of dependency injection. If a list is passed as the last argument instead of a function then it is assumed to be a dependency injection list. It should consist of dependency names, followed by the handler function as the last element in the list. When the handler is invoked these items will be resolved, and passed into the method as parameters. The process is covered in more detail later.

This example shoes the use a of path template instead of a hard coded path. The path parameter name can be accessed using the syntax $exchange.params('name').

This usage includes an extra parameter, the metadata map. The usage of this is covered in more detail in the relevant sections, however the allowed values in this map are as follows:

It is possible to set default values for all of these values using the $undertow.setDefault() method. For example to set a content type header for all handlers you would do $undertow.setDefault('headers', {'Content-Type': application/json}). These defaults only take effect if the corresponding metadata item is not set on the handler.

Handler functions can return a value. How this value is interpreted depends on the handler and what is returned. If the template parameter is specified in the metadata map then this return value is used as the data object for the template. Otherwise if the return value is a string it is sent to the client as the entity body, otherwise the return value will be converted into JSON using JSON.stringify() and the resulting JSON sent to the client.

The first parameter of any handler is the exchange object. This object is a wrapper around the Undertow HttpServerExchange, that makes it easier to use if from within Javascript. If you want to access the actual underlying object for whatever reason you can do so with the $underlying property (this applies to all wrapper objects used by Undertow.js, if the wrapper does not meet your needs you can get the underlying java object and invoke it directly).

The exchange object provides the following methods:

As shown above Undertow.js supports injection into handler functions. To perform an injection pass the name of the injection in a list with the handler function, as shown below:

The injection mechanism is pluggable, and in general injections follow the form type:name. The following injection types are supported out of the box:

It is possible to create aliases for commonly used injections. You can do this by calling the $undertow.alias() function, for example:

Note that alises can not have a type specifier.

Note that this injection support is pluggable, and can be extended by implementing io.undertow.js.InjectionProvider, and adding the implementing class to META-INF/services/io.undertow.js.InjectionProvider.

When injecting JDBC data sources Undertow does not inject the actual datasource, but a JavaScript wrapper object. To get the underlying data source you can refer to the wrappers $underlying property.

The wrapper object has the following methods:

Note that this wrapper mechanism is pluggable, and can be extended by adding a function to the $undertow.injection_wrappers array. This function takes the original object and returns the wrapped result.

It is possible to register wrappers, which act similarly to a Servlet Filter. These can intercept requests before they reach a handler, allowing you to apply cross cutting logic such as transactions or logging. Note that these wrappers only apply to javascript handlers, if a request is not targeted at a handler they will not be invoked.

To register a wrapper you call the $undertow.wrapper() function as follows:

The first optional parameter is an Undertow predicate string, that controls when the wrapper will be invoked (in this case for all .html files). The next argument is an injection list. This works in a similar way to handlers, however this function takes two parameters in addition to any injected one. The $next parameter is a function that should be invoked to invoke the next wrapper or handler in the chain.

It is possible to use template engines to do server side rendering. This mechanism is pluggable, out of the box the mustache and freemarker template engines are supported, with mustache being the default. This is controlled by the template_type entry in the metadata map, and the default can be changed by calling $undertow.setDefault('template_type', 'freemarker');.

To use a template all that is requires is to specify the template name in the metadata map when registering a handler, and then return the data object that you wish to use to render the template:

After the handler function has been installed, the template is rendered with the provided data and sent to the client.

The template mechanism is pluggable, new engines can be added by implementing io.undertow.js.templates.TemplateProvider and adding the implementation class to META-INF/services/io.undertow.js.templates.TemplateProvider.

It is possible to use declarative security by specifying the allowed roles in the metadata map as an array under roles_allowed. The security settings of the Servlet application are used to authenticate the user and perform the check

The special role ** refers to any authenticated user.

An example is shown below:

To register a WebSocket endpoint you can invoke the $undertow.websocket() method as follows:

This connection object is a wrapper around an Undertow WebSocketConnection. It supports the following methods and properties:

The behaviour of the send() function varies depending on the argument. If a string is passed in the string is sent as a text message. If an ArrayBuffer is passed in the data will be sent as a binary message. Otherwise the object will be converted into JSON and the result sent to the client as a text message.

The onText callback will deliver its message as a string, and the onBinary method will deliver it as a Javascript ArrayBuffer. If these callbacks return a value it will be sent to the client using send() (so the same conversion rules apply).

Note that you should never store global or shared state in Javascript objects, as Nashhorn does not support this sort of multi threaded access. If you need to share data between threads you should use a properly synchronised Java object (such as an EJB singleton) and inject this object into your handler.

Before we created Undertow we needed multiple web server technologies to meet our needs. Undertow was designed to be flexible and efficient enough to meet every use case we had and every use case we could think of. Undertow is embeddable and easy to use, but is also well suited for application servers. It has great performance, but also rich enterprise Java capabilities. It has efficient non-blocking reactive APIs, but also more familiar traditional blocking APIs. It has new innovative APIs, but also standard APIs. It can run large dynamic applications, but is also lightweight enough to replace a native web server.

Java 7 or later.

Some browsers share connections between tabs, so even if you have opened another tab the second tab will not load until the first tab has completed.

Undertow is currently planned for EAP7, which will be based on a future WildFly release. It can be used today on its own or within WindFly 8.

Undertow is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

A good starting point is taking a look at our examples.

A number of the developers and users hang out on IRC at #undertow on irc.freenode.org. We also have a mailing list you can subscribe to. Finally, if you are using Undertow in WildFly you can use the general WildFly project forum as well.

In order to best achieve its goals, Undertow requires very close integration with the underlying I/O infrastructure in the Java platform. The simplicity offered by any abstraction comes from hiding the underlying mechanisms behind it. However, the dilemma is that building an extremely efficient and flexible web server requires customization and control of these mechanisms. Undertow attempts to strike the right balance by reusing a minimalistic I/O library, XNIO, that was created for WildFly’s remote invocation layer.

XNIO allows us to eliminate some boiler plate, and also allows for direct I/O integration with the operating system, but it does not go further than that. In addition, XNIO offers very strong backwards compatibility which is important since this is also a concern for the Undertow project. Of course, other projects may have different needs, and thus might make different choices.