Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the need for a reactive paradigm. We also looked at the evolution of the paradigm, from reactive programming to Reactive Extensions and then Reactive Streams. Furthermore, we discussed the Reactive Streams specification as a specification aimed at JVM for the following:

• Processing a potentially unbounded number of elements in a sequence
• Asynchronously passing elements between components with mandatory non-blocking backpressure

At the end of the chapter, we covered Reactor, an implementation by the Pivotal team, and built a sample project with it. In the next chapter, we will discuss the APIs available in Reactor.