Chapter 3. Tools of the trade
The previous chapter explained why you need to be Reactive. Now we will turn our attention to the question of how you can achieve this goal. In this chapter, you will learn:
- The earliest Reactive approaches
- Important functional programming techniques
- Strengths and weaknesses of the existing Reactive tools and libraries
Over the past 30 years, people have designed many tools and paradigms to help build Reactive applications. One of the oldest and most notable is the Erlang programming language (www.erlang.org), created by Joe Armstrong and his team at Ericsson in the mid-1980s. Erlang was the first language that brought Actors, described later in this chapter, into mainstream popularity.
Armstrong and his team faced a daunting challenge: to build a language that would support the creation of distributed applications that are nearly impervious to failure. Over time, Erlang evolved in the Ericsson laboratory, culminating with its use in the late 1990s to build the AXD 301 telephone switch, which reportedly achieved “nine nines” of uptime—availability 99.9999999% of the time. Consider exactly what that means. For a single application running on a single machine, that would be roughly 3 seconds of downtime in 100 years!