Reactive Programming - Reactive Manifesto - Reactive programming specification

Reactive Manifesto - reactive programming specification - features

Reactive programming is a step towards a reactive system. Since reactive programming and reactive systems are such a large and challenging concept, a group of developers has come up with a manifesto for it.

In 2013, the Reactive Manifesto was created in order to spell out the core principles of reactive programming. The goal was to specify a collection of protocols, methods, and interfaces that can be used to express the essential processes and entities.

From https://reactivemanifesto.org/

There are four fundamental characteristics that a reactive system must have:

1. Responsive
2. Resilient
3. Elastic
4. Message Driven

Principles of the specification

1. Non-blocking IO
2. asynchronous
3. stream based communication
4. backpressure handling

Communication patterns enabled by reactive programming specification

Reactive programming is Push/Pull hybrid model.

1. request <-> response
   1. Traditional services. You send a request, you receive a response.
2. request <-> streaming response
   1. You send a request. You receive a streaming response.
   2. Analogies:
      1. Stock price updates.
      2. Order a pizza. Get a message when the order is received. Get a message when the pizza is in the oven. Get a message when the pizza is out of the oven. Get a message when the delivery person is at your door. etc.
3. streaming-request <-> response
   1. You send a streaming request.
   2. We don’t send one http request for each change. Instead, it is a stream of requests.
   3. Analogies
      1. Video streaming
      2. Working on a google doc online.
      3. Wearing a health monitoring device. It keeps sending biometric values to the service in real time.
4. bidirectional streaming
   1. combination of the two above.
   2. Analogies:
      1. Online gaming