Difference between Spring WebFlux and Spring MVC
As Spring WebFlux is an alternative of Spring MVC, so let us know the core differences between them.
Point |
Spring Web-Flux |
Spring MVC |
---|---|---|
Architecture |
Reactive Programming Model (Reactive Streams) |
Synchronous/Blocking Model |
Request Handling |
Asynchronous and non-blocking. |
Synchronous request-response model. |
Supported Servers |
Netty, Undertow etc. |
Servlet containers like Tomcat. |
Performance |
Better for IO-bound apps due to non-blocking. |
Degrades with concurrency due to blocking. |
Use Cases |
Best for data-heavy real-time applications. |
Works well for request-response applications. |
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.