Introduction to Reactive Programming

Reactive programming has existed for years. We can find academic papers on facets of it going back to the 1970s. There have been asynchronous, event-driven programming stacks available for years, too.

So, why hasn’t it been picked up in the mainstream?

This is probably because most shops haven’t needed it. The world is entering a new era, though. Startups have to serve content to millions of users, international audiences demand around-the-clock operational support, and as the cloud-based hosting of applications grows in popularity, simply adding more servers doesn’t work.

Reactive Streams

Developers seek more efficient and consistent usage of existing resources. Reactive Streams is one approach that addresses this.

Reactive Streams is a tiny spec. Its focus is to define a simple contract between publishers and subscribers. Instead of publishing traffic as fast as possible, subscribers ...