Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5

Streaming or real-time systems

Another useful application of WebFlux is with real-time and streaming systems. To understand why WebFlux helps here, let's remind ourselves what real-time and streaming systems are.

First of all, these systems are characterized by low latency and high throughput. For streaming systems, most of the data is outgoing from the server side, so the client side plays the role of a consumer. It is usual for there to be fewer events from the client side than from the server side. However, for real-time systems such as online games, the amount of incoming data is equal to the amount of outgoing data.

Low latency and high throughput can be achieved by using non-blocking communication. As we learned from the previous sections, ...