Reactive

Ups, my last post has been nearly two years ago. But I had made a few interesting technical experiences this years. Apart from some UI focused JavaSrcipt projects, the main challenge during the last two years was to design and implement a ultra high available integration platform. The base technologies for this platform have been Spring and Apache Camel which have proved themselves as a stable and valuable technical platform to meet some very strong requirements concerning availability, exensibility, adaptability and scalablilty.

The reactive idea got my attention at the end of the project by attending a talk at the nordic coding event but I found out that we intentionally implemented some aspects of the reactive idea by using some of the Apache Camel implemented EIPs. Among others it was the SEDA (Staged Event Driven Architecture) pattern provides by Apache Camel that allowed us to achieve a high reactiveness of the system covering a high degree of responsiveness, resilience and elasticity.

Everybody who needs to build applications with some of the above mentioned non functional requirements should consider the ideas of the reactive manifesto and should take a close look at both toolkits like Akka, that are inherent reactive, but also frameworks like Apache Camel that also gives you the opportunity to build reactive applications of some degree.