Thirst-Quenching Streams for the Reactive Mind
2020-10-03, 13:00–13:40 (America/Mexico_City), JVM Languages, Architecture
Language: English

With the advances in multicore hardware and virtualization technologies, and the demand for highly responsive, resilient, and elastic systems as well as increasingly sophisticated applications, an array of reactive data stream processing libraries have been born to address the needs. So what exactly is "Reactive Streams", and how can it meet our computing needs in today's demanding world?


With the advances in multicore hardware and virtualization technologies, and the demand for highly responsive, resilient, and elastic systems and increasingly sophisticated applications, an array of reactive data stream processing libraries have been born to address the ever-increasing needs. 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 that include JVM and Javascript, as well as network protocols. So how do the various library implementations of Reactive Streams, such as Spring Reactor, Reactive Extension (Rx)'s Observables, and RSocket, stack up against each other?

This presentation will go into some details on how streams leverage on the underlying multicore processor to achieve parallelism. It will then explain the push vs the pull streaming model. It will then use a simple use case with code examples to illustrate the different API usages, as well as runtime processing analysis between a few popular Java implementations of Reactive Streams.

Mary is a Senior Developer Advocate at IBM, specializing in Reactive Java, Open Source, Cloud, and Distributed Systems. She started working as a software engineer with C and Unix, then got into Java, Open Source, and web development in the new Millennium, and now she has ventured into Reactive, Mobile, and the DevOps space. In her previous incarnations, she worked for several technology product companies in the Route 128 Boston Technology Corridor as well the San Francisco Bay Area. She now resides in the Greater Chicago area, and is the President and Executive Board Member of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG). She is also an active co-organizers for the Data, Cloud and AI In Chicago, Chicago Cloud, and IBM Cloud Chicago meetup groups. Mary continues to be amazed by how software innovations can dramatically transform our lives. Despite the many challenges in an ever-evolving technical world, she gets energized by the constant change and believes that she has uncovered the pathway to staying young. She can’t wait to see what the next tech wave will be like.