Reactive Streams in Java: Concurrency with RxJava, Reactor, and Akka Streams

© Adam L. Davis 2019

Adam L. DavisReactive Streams in Javahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4176-9_1

1. Introduction to Reactive Streams

Adam L. Davis¹ 

(1)

Oviedo, FL, USA

 

Reactive Streams is an initiative to provide a standard for asynchronous stream processing with non-blocking back pressure. This encompasses efforts aimed at runtime environments (JVM and JavaScript) as well as network protocols.

— reactive-streams.org

At their core, Reactive Streams are an effort to provide highly responsive applications able to handle many requests per second with the ability to manage backpressure (the ability to skip or queue data that is coming too fast to be processed). Asynchronous means processing can take place in many threads, without stopping to ...