Modern API Development with Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3 - Second Edition

5

Asynchronous API Design

So far, we have developed RESTful web services based on the imperative model, where calls are synchronous. What if you want to make code async and non-blocking? This is what we are going to do in this chapter. You’ll learn about asynchronous API design in this chapter, where calls are asynchronous and non-blocking. We’ll develop these APIs using Spring WebFlux, which is based on Project Reactor (https://projectreactor.io). Reactor is a library for building non-blocking apps on a Java virtual machine (JVM).

First, we’ll walk through the reactive programming fundamentals, and then we’ll migrate the existing e-commerce REST API (which we learned about in Chapter 4, Writing Business Logic for APIs) to an asynchronous (reactive) ...