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'Reactive' Development Turns 2.0
electronic convict writes First there was "agile" development. Now there's a new software movement—called 'reactive' development—that sets out principles for building resilient and failure-tolerant applications for cloud, mobile, multicore and Web-scale systems. ReadWrite's Matt Asay sat down with Jonas Bonér, the author of the Reactive Manifesto (just released in version 2.0), for a discussion of what, exactly, the reactive movement aims to fix in software development and how we get there from here.
Organisations working in disparate domains are independently discovering patterns for building software that look the same.[citation needed]
These systems are more robust, more resilient, more flexible and better positioned to meet modern demands.[citation needed]
You have some core principles which make sense in a specific context. You have a book based on these principles but with a good dose of word salad to make it look more powerful. You have preachers hammering it into your head. And you have common people getting brainwashed by something that originally was a good idea, but has been perverted into something that hopefully doesn't damage more than it does good.
Oh, and then there's the Enterprise.
I don't think it was the author's intention to imply that. At first I thought that too, but after reading it two or three times, I think he was trying to draw a parallel to agile methodology, as in "reactive will evolve the same way agile did." I don't think he's right, but whatever.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Obviously the manifesto is so short on details that it can be interpreted in many ways.
Short on detail but long on words. Compare it to the Agile manifesto which has few words, but communicates the ideas very clearly. When you read that, you understand the underlying principles of agile. This manifesto has more words, but still manages to clearly get its idea across.
When it comes to the manifesto linked in the article, as you mention it is short on detail. Specifically, who doesn't want to have a responsive system? Have you ever met anyone who said, "I think I will build a website. I want it to take 15 seconds for the pages to load." Saying you want your site to be responsive is so generic as to be meaningless.
The part that really makes me laugh is the part where they say it will have no bottlenecks. That has been the goal of designers since the day of Von Neumann. He was certain he would design his computer without bottlenecks. Once again, it's something that everyone wants.
The biggest thing they have that isn't generic there is that they require message passing. That seems like a weird requirement to me, but I'm sure they have a reason.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The goal is to promise heaven and earth to the management. Sell bunch of tools to the management, collect handsome consulting fees sell some books etc. By the timethecon job is realized, these guys would be on to their next scam, clueless management would have awarded itself another round of boni, (because everything done by the management deserves a bonus).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Reactive programing already exists. Think of it as observer patterns for every variable and operation or as cell programming like you do with spreadsheets. When you update a spreadsheet cell all the formulas that rely on that cell have their values recalculated.
What they describe is more cell processing where each operation has it's own mini CPU and they all send messages to each other. There were theoretical papers about this structure of design long, long ago during the early days of computers. I'm sure it already has a name and was considerably more thought out than what these guys are saying. Actually, scratch that. I finished reading the article and they at least reference some early designs. I'll give them a point for that.
Please stop picking names that already mean something in the same field.
Please stop picking names that already mean something in the same field.
And don't pick names that can't be searched for online.
I've been following this reactive programming "movement" and it's all traced back to one guy who has a consultancy in "reactive programming" This is the 4th such reactive programming post that I am aware of on /.. No where else have I seen "reactive programming" and this is the only guy I know of who is pushing it.
In addition, the /. comments are highly ciritical of this "movement"
I call on slashdot to identify what articles are slashvertisements and or are carried on special grounds.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.