In this chapter, we are going to explain the concept of reactivity, looking at why reactive approaches are better than traditional approaches. To do this, we will look at examples in which traditional approaches failed. In addition to this, we will explore the fundamental principles of building a robust system, which is mostly referred to as reactive systems. We will also take an overview of the conceptual reasons for building message-driven communication between distributed servers, covering business cases in which reactivity fits well. Then, we will expand the meaning of reactive programming to build a fine-grained reactive system. We will also discuss why the Spring Framework team decided to include a reactive approach as the core part of Spring Framework 5. Based on the content of this chapter, we will understand the importance of reactivity and why it is a good idea to move our projects to the reactive world.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
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Why we need reactivity
- The fundamental principles of the reactive system
- Business cases in which a reactive system design matches perfectly
- Programming techniques that are more suitable for a reactive system
- Reasons for moving Spring Framework to reactivity
