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Introduction to Reactive Programming

Explore the fundamentals of reactive programming and how it applies to building reactive web applications with Spring Boot. Understand core concepts like Reactive Streams, backpressure, and the use of Project Reactor's Flux type to manage asynchronous data flows efficiently without blocking application threads.

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 ...