Reactive Streams VS ea-async

Taken from https://www.reactive-streams.org/

Reactive programming is a paradigm that focuses on non-blocking and asynchronous processing of tasks. One set of specifications/abstractions for reactive programming on JVM is called Reactive Streams. Project Reactor is a message-driven, type-safe and functional implementation of Reactive Streams, and it is used by Spring (via spring-webflux module) to enable reactive web applications. Reactive streams model the data processing as a stream with one end producing the values and one end consuming them.

The reactive streams API provides the specification for non-blocking async streams processing with back pressure mechanism, and Project Reactor is an implementation written in java.

Cats Effect is a little more than just an IO effect implementation as they also provide an interface (or a standard) against implemented as typeclasses. You could think of it as a Java's Reactive Streams library which allows switching underlying implementation of actual effectful streaming.

NOTE: The Reactive Streams API and the implementation of it as provided by Spring WebFlux/Project Reactor is beyond the scope of this particular article. Please consult the appropriate documentation at the 'Web on Reactive Stack' Spring documentation site, any of several sessions I've delivered available on my YouTube channel, or by visiting the Reactive Streams and Project Reactor sites.

There is a very big design space for "Stream" APIs.

Microsoft's LINQ for instance can compile a stream operation into a SQL statement and JooQ does the same. That system offers query optimization and efficient joins that depend on the query system having complete visibility into the queries. indexes built ahead of time, etc.

Another extreme is a system like

https://www.reactive-streams.org/

that are especially good for apply a filter and map and other operations to a stream of real time events, e.g. instead of having a pull operation such as a for-loop over an Iterable, items go into the system from a stream.

I've worked on systems that use the later kind of streaming to run batch jobs and you can get great performance (780% speedup with 8 cpus) on crazy heterogenous workloads. You do have to be careful though to shut the system down or flush it out or otherwise you get wrong answers. Frequently those frameworks don't shut themselves down properly unless you implement clean shutdown yourself.

The point is that operators like "filter" and "map" and the rest are so powerful because they are portable between the minimal pidove up to a Hadoop cluster.

Backpressure is a protocol defining how to send a logical signal UP the stream with information about the downstream consumers readiness to receive more data. That backpressure signal follows the same path as data moving downstream, but in reverse. If downstream is not ready to consume, then upstream does does not send.

Reactive libraries like reactor are build on the Reactive Streams specification, just read that first sentence.

Not a well written article. "Fiber" was dropped by spec team way back in favor of "virtual thread". Mentions "Rx Java" but not http://www.reactive-streams.org/ as a standard for existing async IO. I mean anyone who has done reactive java long enough can tell you about various implementations! I expected a better article from infoworld.com

I feel like this misses the reason I like extension methods: discoverability.

With an extension method, I can do `object.` and my IDE will tell me what can be called on object. With a static helper method, it isn't as easy to know what is available. I need to know which helpers actually exist.

Since this doesn't have IDE support, it doesn't help discoverability. I'm not going to get nice autocomplete that shows me what is available. In fact, my IDE is going to highlight it as a bug. If I have a spelling mistake, I won't be able to easily pick it up - I'll assume it's just the normal complaint for all of these fluent extension methods.

That makes this simply syntactic sugar rather than something that actually helps me discover things more easily. It then hurts readability and navigation since I can't easily click through to get the definition of the method.

On a more general note about Java, things like this are one of the reasons I don't love the Java ecosystem. People try to change the behavior of Java in really hacky ways that don't work well. I understand that it's an attempt to overcome shortcomings in the language, but when one looks other languages it becomes clear that Java could have just evolved the language to be better. Java has lots of good things and I'm not looking to argue that. However, when I look at things like this, it makes me think that Java needs to really address the core language.

Instead, we get lots of tools like this which might be nice, but make it really hard to understand what's going on. Electronic Arts created an async/await library that'll do crazy stuff to let you do async/await style programming (https://github.com/electronicarts/ea-async). Yes, Java is doing good things with structured concurrency and Project Loom, but the point is how people keep trying to work around the language. There are so many POJO generators it isn't funny: AutoValue, Immutables, JodaBeans, Lombok, and more I'm probably forgetting. Java records don't fulfill everything (and they're at least a decade late). Java doesn't support expression trees for lambdas so libraries sometimes do crazy hacky things to make that exist.

Java is a great piece of technology, but it feels like people are often trying to overcome issues with the language through really hacky means in a way that I don't see in other languages. Java is getting better about modernizing the language, but it still feels like people are running against the language more than in other ecosystems.

https://github.com/electronicarts/ea-async via preprocessing the bytecode in the jar or at start time

Like I mentioned in the other comment - EA Async can help there, it brings async-await semantics to CompletableFutures and resilience4j has CompletableFuture decorators that you can apply to get retries, circuit-breakers and all the good stuff they offer.