Reactive Web Applications: Covers Play, Akka, and Reactive Streams

Reactive applications build on top of components that communicate asynchronously as they react to user and system events. As a result, they become scalable, responsive, and fault-tolerant. Java and Scala developers can use the Play Framework and the Akka concurrency toolkit to easily implement reactive applications without building everything from scratch.

Reactive Web Applications teaches web developers how to benefit from the reactive application architecture and presents hands-on examples using Play, Akka, Scala, and Reactive Streams. This book starts by laying out the fundamentals required for writing functional and asynchronous applications and quickly introduces Play as a framework to handle the plumbing of your application. The book alternates between chapters that introduce reactive ideas (asynchronous programming with futures and actors, managing distributed state with CQRS) and practical examples that show you how to build these ideas into your applications.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Getting started with reactive web applications
Chapter 1: Did you say reactive?
Chapter 2: Your first reactive web application
Chapter 3: Functional programming primer
Chapter 4: Quick introduction to Play

Part 2: Core concepts
Chapte 5: Futures
Chapter 6: Actors
Chapter 7: Dealing with state
Chapter 8: Responsive user interfaces

Part 3: Advanced topics
Chapter 9: Reactive Streams
Chapter 10: Deploying reactive Play applications
Chapter 11: Testing reactive web applications

appendix A: Installing the Play Framework
appendix B: Recommended reading
appendix C: Further reading