Spring Framework and reactive applications

Spring Framework adopted reactive in 2013 (the same time reactive was born and became more mainstream) with the release of Version 1.0 of Reactor. This was the time when Spring Framework Version 4.0 was released and Spring got itself engaged with Pivotal. In 2016, Spring's 4.3 Version was released with Reactor's Version 3.0. Around this period, the work on Spring's Version 5.0 (major version) was actively under construction.

With new-generation application requirements, many conventional coding practices were challenged. One of the main aspects was to get rid of blocking IO and to find an alternative to conventional imperative programming.

Web applications backed by a Servlet container are inherently blocking, and Spring 5 did a great deal in web application development by introducing a fresh web application framework based on reactive programming: Spring WebFlux.

Spring also has embraced Rx and has used it in many ways within Spring 5. With Spring 5, reactive features are baked into it in many aspects, helping developers to embrace reactive programming easily in a slow-paced manner.

Pivotal is heavily invested in Reactor but has exposed APIs, allowing developers to choose the library of their choice between Reactor and RxJava.

The following diagram depicts Spring 5's reactive programming support:

Reactor is Pivotal's (SpringSource) answer to implementing Reactive Streams Specification. As mentioned earlier, Spring is heavily invested in Reactor and this section aims to delve a bit deeper into Reactor.

Reactor is a fourth-generation reactive library for building non-blocking applications on the JVM based on the Reactive Streams Specification.

An overview of the history of Project Reactor can be pictorially represented in the following figure:

The figure above shows the major releases of Project Reactor. The project kick started in the year 2013 (1.x version) and the major release of 3.x was released in the year 2016. As of writing this book, the core module of the framework is at version 3.1.8.RELEASE.

Now that we have a brief understanding of Spring Framework and its connection with reactive programming, lets dive a bit deep into Project Reactor.