Chapter 1. Did you say reactive?
This chapter covers
- Reactive applications and their origin
- Why reactive applications are necessary
- How Play helps you build reactive applications
Over the past few years, web applications have started to take an increasingly important role in our lives. Be it large applications such as social networks, medium-sized ones such as e-banking sites, or smaller ones such as online accounting systems or project management tools for small businesses, our dependency on these services is clearly growing. This trend is now transitioning to physical devices, and the information technology research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that the Internet of Things will grow to an installed base of 26 billion units by 2020.[1]
1Gartner, “Gartner Says the Internet of Things Installed Base Will Grow to 26 Billion Units By 2020” (December 12, 2013), www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2636073.
Reactive web applications are an answer to the new requirements of high availability and resource efficiency brought by this rapid evolution. Cloud computing and the subsequent emergence of cloud services have shifted web application development from an activity wherein one application tries to solve all kinds of problems to a process of identifying and connecting to adequate cloud services and only solving those problems that have not been solved beforehand satisfactorily.