Reactive span across Spring modules

By introducing a reactive web framework, WebFlux , Spring also made necessary changes in other modules to provide first-class support for WebFlux. Spring Boot, Spring Security, Thymeleaf, and Spring Data are among the few modules that are equipped with WebFlux capabilities. This can be described with the following diagram:

Spring Data has adopted a reactive paradigm and started supporting infinite streams from the database with the @Tailableannotation. Spring Data JPA is mostly associated with RDBMS, which is blocking in nature so it cannot support Reactive Programming.

Spring MVC is inherently blocking in nature; however, we can use Reactive Programming for some of the parts, which can be converted to be reactive. For example, the Spring MVC controller can be equipped with the Flux and Mono types to handle the data stream in a reactive way.

Apart from this, a few annotations like @Controller, @RequestMapping, and so on are supported in WebFlux so you can convert a Spring MVC application to WebFlux in an incremental manner. We will see more details about reactive support in Spring Framework through WebFlux by creating a sample application.