Advantages of WebFlux
- Scalability: It can handle more requests concurrently using less resources due to non-blocking I/O. This improves scalability.
- Responsiveness: Applications remain highly responsive even under heavy load since requests are not blocked waiting for I/O.
- Resource efficiency: Fewer threads are required to handle the same number of requests than blocking applications.
- Resiliency: Failure of one request impacts only some. Backpressure prevents overloading.
Basic Introduction to Spring WebFlux
Spring WebFlux is a reactive, non-blocking web framework that uses Project Reactor’s reactive streams API to enable highly concurrent and asynchronous processing of web requests in a non-blocking and event-driven way. It is fully asynchronous and non-blocking using reactive streams and callbacks.
- It uses Project Reactor as the underlying reactive library for composable asynchronous and event-based programming.
- The core abstraction is around reactive streams – publishers that provide push-based asynchronous streams of data.
- Controllers return Publisher or Mono types instead of ModelAndView. Responses are streamed back incrementally.
- It is optimized for non-blocking and event-driven applications on modern servers like Netty and Undertow.
In this article, we will explore the advantages and disadvantages of Spring WebFlux – a non-blocking web framework.