'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.

Comments

Methodologies are like religion

[heldal]

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.

Re:Methodologies are like religion

[Jane Q. Public]

Methodologies are like religion

But this isn't a "methodology" at all. It's a statement of goals.

This isn't an "alternative to Agile", because it isn't a methodology. You can use Agile to achieve this "reactive system".

Frankly, it looks like a bunch of BS buzzwords to me. I write software to meet my customer's needs. "Reactive" attempts to define those needs... but NO, that's what the customer does.

This might be something good to show a client who wants a web site built, which you then proceed to build using Agile or some other methodology. But it isn't a methodology itself, and calling that thing a "Manifesto" is a joke.

"We want a machine that makes things cold. We don't care how it's built. We'll call this... The Refrigerator Manifesto".

Give me a frigging break. In fact I have to think this is actually somebody's idea of a joke.

Re:Failure tolerance is a mortal sin

[phantomfive]

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.