QCon San Francisco 2021 November 1-5, 2021 | | Servlet vs Reactive: Choosing the Right Stack

Abstract

When Netflix upgraded their main gateway, serving 83 million users, from Servlet based, blocking Zuul 1 to the Netty based, non-blocking Zuul 2, the results were interesting and nuanced with benefits and trade-offs. Spring Framework 5 provides a similar choice with Servlet based Spring MVC and the new reactive, web framework called Spring WebFlux.

How do you make sense of this choice? The key is to understand the trade-offs and pick the right stack for the job at hand. Of course you also need understand differences in the execution models and the impact on the programming model you use.

In this session we'll discuss these questions and also use demo code.

Question:

What’s the motivation for this talk?

Answer:

Spring Framework 5 provides two web stacks. One is a classic, Servlet stack with blocking I/O that most Java enterprise applications use today. The other is a Reactive stack that's built on an event-loop, non-blocking execution model and can handle high concurrency with less hardware resources. The motivation for this talk is to explain the differences in the execution models, demonstrate through demo code, and provide insights on trade-offs and making choices.

Question:

What do you hope someone will leave this talk with?

Answer:

A concrete understanding of how the Reactive stack is different from the classic Servlet stack, what benefits it provides, and how the developer experience might change.

Question:

How you you describe the persona and level of the target audience?

Answer:

Anyone developing server-side Java applications, especially those with existing Servlet applications, would benefit by learning about this major shift that's taking place. The talk doesn't make too many assumptions beyond that. There are no specific skills or expertise level required.

Speaker: Rossen Stoyanchev

Spring Framework Committer @Pivotal

Rossen is a Spring Framework committer at Pivotal in NYC. He is deeply involved in the Spring 5 effort to enable reactive programming models starting with a reactive foundation for web applications and extending to data, messaging, and more.