A Gentle Intro to Reactive Java Programming and Systems

As Java is an object-oriented language that inherently supports the imperative programming style, asynchronicity presents a challenge that can turn the code into nightmare. One way to deal with the complexity of asynchronicity is to introduce reactivity onto the coding level (reactive programming), and/or to handle it on the design and architecture level (reactive systems design).

This talk presents to the audience a few of the major Java-based reactive frameworks and toolkits in the market today, such as RxJava, Spring Reactor, Akka, and Vert,x. It will start by going over the basic tenets of reactive systems, and some examples of the problems that these systems aim to solve. It will discuss the 2 most commonly used Java frameworks for implementing reactive coding - RxJava and Spring Reactor, and will show some code samples. It will then bring the audience to the next level of "reactivity' by introducing 2 reactive frameworks - Akka and Vert,x, which are usually used for implementing reactive microservices. It will draw some comparisons between these 2 frameworks and cite some real-life examples of their usages.

The takeaways for the audience will be an understanding of the key differences between reactive programming versus reactive systems, and the strength and weaknesses of each of the surveyed frameworks.