Reactive systems have certain characteristics that make them ideal for low-latency, high-throughput workloads. Project Reactor and the Spring portfolio work together to enable developers to build enterprise-grade reactive systems that are responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-driven.
What is reactive processing?
Reactive processing is a paradigm that enables developers build non-blocking, asynchronous applications that can handle back-pressure (flow control).
Why use reactive processing?
Reactive systems better utilize modern processors. Also, the inclusion of back-pressure in reactive programming ensures better resilience between decoupled components.
Project Reactor
Project Reactor is a fully non-blocking foundation with back-pressure support included. It’s the foundation of the reactive stack in the Spring ecosystem and is featured in projects such as Spring WebFlux, Spring Data, and Spring Cloud Gateway.
One of the main reasons developers move from blocking to non-blocking code is efficiency. Reactive code does more work with fewer resources. Project Reactor and Spring WebFlux let developers take advantage of multi-core, next-generation processors—handling potentially massive numbers of concurrent connections. With reactive processing, you can satisfy more concurrent users with fewer microservice instances.
Reactive Microservices With Spring Boot
The Spring portfolio provides two parallel stacks. One is based on a Servlet API with Spring MVC and Spring Data constructs. The other is a fully reactive stack that takes advantage of Spring WebFlux and Spring Data’s reactive repositories. In both cases, Spring Security has you covered with native support for both stacks.
Integration with common technologies
Accessing and processing data in a reactive way is important. MongoDB, Redis, and Cassandra all have native reactive support in Spring Data. Many relational databases (Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, H2, and Google Spanner) have reactive support via R2DBC. In the world of messaging, Spring Cloud Stream also supports reactive access to platforms like RabbitMQ and Kafka.
