Reactive Design Patterns

Modern distributed applications must deliver near-realtime performance while simultaneously managing big data and high user loads spread across environments ranging from cloud systems to mobile devices. Unlike traditional enterprise applications which focus on decoupling their internal components by defining programming interfaces, reactive applications go one step further and decouple their components also at runtime. This makes it possible to react effectively and efficiently to failures, varying user demands, and changes in the application''s execution environment. The resulting systems are highly concurrent and fault-tolerant, with minimal dependencies among individual system components.

Offers best patterns for building reactive applications

All patterns include concrete examples

Discover best practices

Explains theory behind reactive system design principles

Readers should be familiar with a standard programming language like Java, C++ or C# and be comfortable with the basics of distributed systems. Although most of the book''s examples use the Scala language, no prior experience with Scala or Akka is required.

The design patterns in this book were collected by the consultants and engineers of Typesafe during thousands of hours spent building enterprise-quality applications using Scala and Akka. Although many reactive patterns can be implemented using standard development tools like Java, others require the capabilities offered by a functional programming language like Scala and an Actor-based concurrency system like Akka.