Modern Java in Action

Chapter 15. Concepts behind CompletableFuture and reactive programming

This chapter covers

• Threads, Futures, and the evolutionary forces causing Java to support richer concurrency APIs
• Asynchronous APIs
• The boxes-and-channels view of concurrent computing
• CompletableFuture combinators to connect boxes dynamically
• The publish-subscribe protocol that forms the basis of the Java 9 Flow API for reactive programming
• Reactive programming and reactive systems

In recent years, two trends are obliging developers to rethink the way software is written. The first trend is related to the hardware on which applications run, and the second trend concerns how applications are structured (particularly how they interact). We discussed the effect of the hardware ...