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'Reactive' Development Turns 2.0

Posted by timothy on from the off-with-their-oh-wait-that's-reactionary dept.

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.

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Failure tolerance is a mortal sin by pijokela · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think it means what you think it means. Obviously the manifesto is so short on details that it can be interpreted in many ways. I think the failure tolerance is more about e.g. tolerance of losing machines or tolerance of overloading - and that seems to be working.

    I have previous experience about J2EE/JEE application servers and they always seemed to have the problem that when overloaded with traffic they might do anything. And after being severely overloaded they often do not recover back to normal. Also people often did not use J2EE session replication, because it was considered a pain.

    Now I'm building an app with Scala/Play framework and we don't have user sesssions or the web servers so scaling and server failures are not a problem. Also we just ran some performance / load tests and the servers work fine up to 100% load and then just start to lose some requests. This is much preferrable to the "all bets are off" that I have seen on Tomcat or other servlet containers. Another reactive benefit from the Play server is that it is super easy to use many threads for building a single http reply and this really helps in giving users timely replys.

    So while the manifesto is of course marketing, there are some good things in the new ways of doing things.

  2. agile != reactive by andyverbunt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think reactive is the evolution of agile, as the author in the author implies.

  3. Successor to Agile/Scrum by Kethinov · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If anyone's really looking for a 21st century successor to Agile/Scrum, I would recommend checking out the "async" manifesto which was written in a manner deliberately parodying the agile manifesto: http://asyncmanifesto.org/

    --
    You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
  4. There's another name for this kind of developmen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe I'm missing something here, but this "reactive" nonsense keeps popping up every few months and I still don't see what's new.

    As far as I can tell, this person (or persons) has discovered something that has a name already: Event-driven programming. It's been around for a very long time. It has many of the benefits of naive multi-threaded coding without the warts. But it introduces warts of its own, with event orderings being the big one.