The Reactive Revolution

The Reactive revolution promises resilient systems that can communicate end-to-end all the way to the database. Join me as I show you how, for the first time, it is easily achievable for everyone to create unbounded and asynchronous systems!

Since the “Reactive Manifesto” in 2013, we’ve seen the topic of Reactive systems go from being a virtually unacknowledged technique for constructing applications - used by only fringe projects within a select few corporations - to become part of the overall platform strategy for many industry leaders.

My goal is to show how recent simple and flexible innovations have removed historical barriers to using Reactive everywhere. You can use them directly or as Netflix has done, as the basis for a whole suite of advanced use cases. You’ll leave this room with a good sense of what reactive programming is, and how to create an end-to-end reactive API.

The Reactive revolution promises resilient systems that can communicate end-to-end all the way to the database. Join me as I show you how, for the first time, it is easily achievable for everyone to create unbounded and asynchronous systems!

My talk overview:

I kick-off by covering the theory of Reactive Systems and the rise of Reactive Programming. I then centre on how this idea evolved to using “Functional Reactive data” flows, and how you can use these flows to overcome the known difficulties of end-to-end blocking IO.

I then discuss recent innovations that attempt to negate historical barriers to using Reactive everywhere - data access and networking. I do this by introducing 2 new innovations in the reactive ecosystem - Rsocket and Reactive Databases.

• The Rsocket protocol - developed by, among others, folks from Netflix who have since moved to Facebook. Rsocket is a wire protocol that surfaces the tenants of reactive processing as part of the protocol itself.

• Reactive Databases, as an idea, are a breakthrough in programming. They allow for building data flows with streams of data and better resource utilisation without the headaches.

These two innovations allow us to build reactive systems that communicate service-to-service using Sockets all the way to the database.

This all leads into a live coding demo that uses Vanilla HTML5 to interface into a reactive API and persist live Twitter messages. The audience will be given the opportunity to take part in real-time.

My inspiration:

The mainstream adoption of the Spring Framework’s “Project Reactor” has led to a groundswell of adoption of its easy to use “Functional Reactive endpoints”. This, coupled with the recent innovations in non-blocking language and server changes, has allowed for fully reactive end-to-end systems to be built for the first time.

Why am I the best person to do this talk?

1) I will do the topic proud!

For 13 years I have developed distributed enterprise applications. I also train hundreds of developers in Reactive fundamentals each year.

2) I will do the conference proud!

As a seasoned speaker, I often speak at both International conferences and local user groups. I have experience in delivering talks to large groups (400+) and have been professionally trained.

3) I will do the community proud!

I have spoken on Reactive Systems at both conferences and user groups for the last 3 years. I strongly believe in technology evangelism and have been an active mentor in helping the community create a South African flavoured digital disruption strategy.