In November, my friend Milen Dyankov started it all by inviting me to come to Warsaw to give a talk at a local developer meetup (sponsored by Liferay, Milen’s employer). After attending several big conferences during the year, coming to talk at a much smaller event sounded quite relaxing! Visiting Warsaw for the first time was also tempting so I agreed to attend.
The event was organized in a warm and cozy pub in the center of Warsaw. It was serving countless brands of beer of different tastes and had a delicate atmosphere of a small mountain cottage. Very lovely!
As the audience was much smaller than usual and the atmosphere more familiar, my talk quickly turned into a discussion about reactive programming and how it is different to a traditional approach to programming. We then delved into where reactive programming is useful and where it’s counterproductive and how to adopt reactive concepts in a sensible way. Later, we even touched on the idea of evolutionary development, starting with simple architecture and gradually evolving to more complex, asynchronous, and even reactive architecture once there’s a need for it. We also discussed what Eclipse MicroProfile is, the people behind it and how the Eclipse Foundation provides a great collaborative platform to evolve this set of Java specifications.
I also mentioned the Vert.x framework, which is a neat reactive framework and is useful when there’s an extensive need for optimal use of system resources by an application. However, we concluded that MicroProfile is much simpler to work with for people just coming to reactive programming. It’s a nice compromise because it allows mixing both traditional and reactive programming in an elegant and productive way.
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