Book Image

Scala Reactive Programming

By : Rambabu Posa
Book Image

Scala Reactive Programming

By: Rambabu Posa

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is a scalable, fast way to build applications, and one that helps us write code that is concise, clear, and readable. It can be used for many purposes such as GUIs, robotics, music, and others, and is central to many concurrent systems. This book will be your guide to getting started with Reactive programming in Scala. You will begin with the fundamental concepts of Reactive programming and gradually move on to working with asynchronous data streams. You will then start building an application using Akka Actors and extend it using the Play framework. You will also learn about reactive stream specifications, event sourcing techniques, and different methods to integrate Akka Streams into the Play Framework. This book will also take you one step forward by showing you the advantages of the Lagom framework while working with reactive microservices. You will also learn to scale applications using multi-node clusters and test, secure, and deploy your microservices to the cloud. By the end of the book, you will have gained the knowledge to build robust and distributed systems with Scala and Akka.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

A Scala Future versus a Java Future

We will discuss one of the important topics such as the differences between a Scala Future and a Java Future in this section:

  • A Java Future works in a synchronous blocking way. It does not work in an asynchronous non-blocking way, whereas a Scala Future works in an asynchronous non-blocking way.
  • If we want an asynchronous non-blocking feature, we should use Java 8's CompletableFuture. However, if we observe the CompletableFuture code, it is a bit clumsy, not elegant, and not concise, unlike that of Scala's Future. It is a bit tough to reason with.
  • Scala Futures support very elegant and concise ways of writing concurrency code and support Concurrency and true Parallelism, very well. Java Futures/CompletableFutures support Concurrency, but do not support true Parallelism.

What is true Parallelism really?

True Parallelism means supporting...