Reactive Web Applications

Chapter 9. Reactive Streams

This chapter covers

• Reasons for defining a Reactive Streams standard
• The building blocks of the Akka Streams library that implements Reactive Streams
• Using Akka Streams in combination with iteratees and building a simple flow graph
• Observing reactive back pressure in action

The Reactive Streams standard (www.reactive-streams.org) defines the interfaces, methods, and protocols necessary for building interoperable libraries that enable asynchronous stream processing with nonblocking back pressure. There are already a few implementations of this standard, and in this chapter we’ll take a look at the Akka Streams library (http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka-stream-and-http-experimental/current). We’ll start by asking ...