First-hand reactive programming

Vasily Prokofiev is a developer at Usetech in Ryazan. At the Java Meeting Point, he will share his experiences with reactive programming.

In this interview, Vasily shared some of the details of the report and explained why the approach that will be discussed deserves attention.

At the Java Meeting Point, you will talk about reactive programming. Tell us why you chose this topic?

We learned a lot on a reactive programming project, and I wanted to share my experiences – both the challenges we faced and the joys of using this approach. The basics are well covered on the Internet, but more complex things are already difficult to find. We dealt with some issues as a whole team, and I think it will be useful to convey such experience.

I have prepared some code examples on which I will show you different subtleties of reactive programming. I tried to prepare the report so that everyone could understand it – only basic knowledge of functional programming, Java Core and Java 8 is needed.

What will the conference participants learn after your presentation?

Participants will get acquainted with reactive programming in Java, learn the basic skills of working with the Project Reactor, and also understand the basic methods of the library.

Why did you get interested in reactive programming?

Now more and more often, a large load on servers is required, and due to the fact that approaches to their development are outdated, the synchronous multi-threaded way of developing applications involves a lot of overhead and machine downtime. Reactive programming is a good alternative.

When I was just starting to get involved in this topic, I read how to make a server for Minecraft on a weak home computer. And it turned out, if you do it in a standard way, using synchronous programming, 4 people could enter the server. With a reactive approach, 1,500 people could work safely on this server, and a bunch of resources remained on the computer.

And this topic is very actively used in our project for a bank that is in the top 3 in Russia. And we use reactive programming everywhere: we can have thousands of transactions per second, and it is very difficult to process such an array of information in a standard way.

What projects need reactive programming?

It should be remembered that reactive programming also creates a lot of problems: difficulties appear when debugging code, when catching errors, and so on. Therefore, if the project is small, then there is no point in doing it on jet rails. But if you need a lot of request throughput, or you need to process really large data, this approach will be very useful.

Join the conference – registration is open Online…