Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Reactor

By : Rahul Sharma
Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Reactor

By: Rahul Sharma

Overview of this book

Reactor is an implementation of the Java 9 Reactive Streams specification, an API for asynchronous data processing. This specification is based on a reactive programming paradigm, enabling developers to build enterprise-grade, robust applications with reduced complexity and in less time. Hands-On Reactive Programming with Reactor shows you how Reactor works, as well as how to use it to develop reactive applications in Java. The book begins with the fundamentals of Reactor and the role it plays in building effective applications. You will learn how to build fully non-blocking applications and will later be guided by the Publisher and Subscriber APIs. You will gain an understanding how to use two reactive composable APIs, Flux and Mono, which are used extensively to implement Reactive Extensions. All of these components are combined using various operations to build a complete solution. In addition to this, you will get to grips with the Flow API and understand backpressure in order to control overruns. You will also study the use of Spring WebFlux, an extension of the Reactor framework for building microservices. By the end of the book, you will have gained enough confidence to build reactive and scalable microservices.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introduction to SpringWebFlux

To enable us to build web-based services, SpringWebFlux offers the following programming models:

  • Annotations: Annotations were originally part of the SpringMVC stack. These annotations are also supported by the SpringWebFlux framework. This is the easiest way of getting started with the SpringWebFlux stack.
  • Functional endpoints: This model allows us to build Java 8 functions as web endpoints. The application can be configured as a set of routes, handlers, and filters. It then enables passing all of these as lambda functions in order to build the application in a functional paradigm.

In order to work with SpringWebFlux, we need to configure an underlying server. While writing this book, Netty, Tomcat, Jetty, and Undertow are the choices currently offered here. Netty is often used as the standard choice because it performs well for asynchronous, non...