We've talked about Reactor in the previous Radars. It has continued to gain traction in many of our projects. With the Spring ecosystem embracing Reactor, it has become the dominant implementation of Reactive Streams. Reactive systems come with improved scalability and resilience but with increased cost of debugging and a steeper learning curve. For those projects where this tradeoff is acceptable, Reactor has proven to be a good choice. Some of our projects have observed significant improvements in scalability once they moved to Reactor and the rest of the Reactive stack. With R2DBC we are starting to get reactive support for RDBMS drivers which addresses one of the weaknesses of reactive services.
Reactor is a library for building non-blocking applications on the JVM — version 8 and above — based on the Reactive Streams specification. Reactive programming emphasizes moving from imperative logic to asynchronous, non-blocking and functional style code, especially when dealing with external resources. Reactor implements the reactive stream specification and provides two publisher APIs — Flux (0 to N elements) and Mono (0 or 1 element) — to effectively model push-based stream processing. Reactor project is well suited for microservices architecture and offers back pressure–ready network engines for HTTP, WebSockets, TCP and UDP traffic.
