Chapter 1. What is a reactive application?
This chapter covers
- The changing world of technology
- Applications with massive user bases
- Traditional versus reactive: modeling complex, distributed software
- The Reactive Manifesto
One of the most fascinating things in nature is the ability of a species to adapt to its changing environment. The canonical example is Great Britain’s peppered moth. When newly industrialized Great Britain became polluted in the 19th century, slow-growing, light-colored lichens that covered trees died, resulting in a blackening of the trees’ bark. The impact was quite profound: light-colored peppered moths, which historically were well-camouflaged and in the majority, now found themselves the obvious targets of many a hungry bird. Their rare dark-colored siblings, which had been conspicuous before, now blended into the recently polluted ecosystem. As the birds changed from eating dark-colored to light-colored moths, the previously common light-colored moth became the minority, and the dynamics of Britain’s moth population changed.