Reactive Design Patterns

Chapter 3. Tools of the trade

The previous chapter explained why you need to be Reactive. Now we will turn our attention to the question of how you can achieve this goal. In this chapter, you will learn:

• The earliest Reactive approaches
• Important functional programming techniques
• Strengths and weaknesses of the existing Reactive tools and libraries

3.1. Early Reactive solutions

Over the past 30 years, people have designed many tools and paradigms to help build Reactive applications. One of the oldest and most notable is the Erlang programming language (www.erlang.org), created by Joe Armstrong and his team at Ericsson in the mid-1980s. Erlang was the first language that brought Actors, described later in this chapter, into mainstream ...