SpringSource fires up the asynchronous Reactor framework

SpringSource has announced Reactor, an open source framework for building asynchronous applications on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Reactor is named after the design pattern of the same name and can be used in conjunction with Java and Groovy or other languages based on the JVM. SpringSource, known for its open source Spring Framework for Java, promises performance as one of the main design benefits of Reactor. According to the developers, the code is able to process more than 15 million events per second with a non-blocking dispatcher when using "modest hardware".

Taking cues from the Reactor design pattern and several other event-driven design practices, the framework processes service requests and dispatches them to appropriate event handlers. Developers can choose from several different dispatcher options ranging from non-blocking to thread-pool style dispatchers, depending on the nature of tasks that occur in different parts of the application. Reactor aims to provide developers with a number of abstractions that can be combined to create applications that use system resources as efficiently as possible. In this way, the system can be used to handle anything from a very high volume of tasks to long running processes and in between.

SpringSource, which is now part of Pivotal the company created by EMC and VMWare, says that cloud applications will especially benefit from the the high performance of the framework. According to the company, Reactor is "designed to be a foundational framework for applications that need high throughput when performing reasonably small chunks of stateless, asynchronous processing" as is often the case in modern applications that have to deal with a high volume of automatically generated data.

The source code for Reactor is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License. An introduction to the framework with code examples can be found in the project's README file.

(fab)