It’s Time to Start Making Your Web Apps Reactive

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You’ve heard of the principle of “survival of the fittest”, and you know that it’s especially true in web development. Your users expect split-second performance and bug-free interfaces — and if you can’t deliver them, you can be sure they’ll go straight to a competitor who can. But when it comes to survival, it’s important to remember the full principal of evolution: the best way to thrive is to be adaptable to change.

That’s where reactive programming comes in. Reactive applications are created to be adaptable to their environments by design. Right from the start, you’re building something made to react to load, react to failure, and react to your users. Whatever being deployed to production throws at your application, reactive programming will mean it can handle it.

How does reactive programming achieve this? It embeds sound programming principles into your application right from the very beginning.

Reactive Applications Are Message-driven

In reactive programming, data is pushed, not pulled. Rather than making requests of data that may or may not be available, client recipients await the arrival of messages with instructions only when data is ready. The designs of sender and recipient aren’t affected by how you propagate your messages, so you can design your system in isolation without needing to worry about how messages are transmitted. This also means that data recipients are only consuming resources when they’re active, rather than bogging down your application with requests for unavailable data.

Reactive Applications Are Elastic

Reactive applications are designed to elastically scale up or scale down, based on the amount of workload they have to deal with. A reactive system can both increase or decrease the resources it gives to its inputs, working without bottlenecks or contention points to more easily shard components and then distribute resources among them. Not only does this save you money on unused computing power, but even more importantly, it means that your application can easily service spikes in user activity.

Reactive Applications Are Responsive

Reactive applications must react to their users, and to their users' behavior. It’s essential that the system responds in a timely manner, not only for improved user experience, but so that problems can be quickly identified and (hopefully!) solved. With rapid response times and a consistent quality of service, you’ll find that your application has simpler error handling as well as much greater user confidence.

Reactive Applications Are Resilient

Reactive applications need to respond, adapt, and be flexible in the face of failure. Because a system can fail at any time, reactive applications are designed to boost resiliency through distribution. If there's a single point of failure, it’s just that — singular. The rest of your reactive application keeps running, because it’s been built to work without relying on any one part.

Further Resources

Reactive programming can be challenging to master. Fortunately, there’s lots of resources to help you out. Some of the best are the books and videos of Manning Publications, publishers of the highest quality tech books and videos you can buy today.

Exploring Modern Web Development is a 100% free guide to the most common tools for reactive programming. With this well-rounded sampler, you’ll have a firm foundation for developing awesome web apps with all the modern reactive features and functions today’s users expect.

SitePoint users can get 40% off top Manning reactive programming and web development books and videos with the coupon code NLSITEPOINT40. Check out popular bestsellers here.

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