Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5

Assembly-time

The first part of the stream life-cycle is an assembly-time. As we may have noticed from the previous sections, Reactor provides us with a fluent API that allows the building of a complex flow of element processing. At first glance, the API offered by Reactor looks like a builder that composes selected operators in the flow. As we may remember, the Builder pattern is mutable and assumes that a terminal operation such as build executes the building of another object. In contrast to a common builder pattern, the Reactor API offers immutability. Consequently, each applied operator produces a new object. In reactive libraries, that process of building the execution flow is called assembling. In order to understand the assembling ...