The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of the Reactive Foundation, a new community that aims to promote the use of reactive programming in networked applications.

The founder members of the new foundation are Alibaba, Facebook, Lightbend, Netifi and Pivotal, and the foundation is taking under its wing open source reactive specifications starting with RSocket.

Reactive programming is asynchronous and uses the availability of new information to control the logic rather than a thread-of-execution. There's an argument that the spreadsheet is the archetypal reactive application. The new foundation aims to provide a formal open governance model and neutral ecosystem for supporting open source reactive programming projects.

RSocket is an application protocol providing Reactive Streams semantics. It's a binary protocol for use on byte stream transports such as TCP, WebSockets, and Aeron. It enables the following symmetric interaction models via async message passing over a single connection. It supports session resumption, to allow resuming long-lived streams across different transport connections. The development team behind RSocket says this is particularly useful for mobile - server communication when network connections drop, switch, and reconnect frequently.

Discussing the new foundation, Netifi's CEO Arsalan Farooq said that since inventing RSocket, Netifi's hope has been that it would become pervasive, so it has always been a freely available and open specification. He said:

"We hope to see the modern network protocol RSocket replace HTTP as the lingua franca of microservices and distributed systems. That would help fill the technology gap so that a traditional enterprise developer can build sophisticated, cloud-native, distributed applications with minimal effort."

Jonas Bonér, CTO and Co-Founder of Lightbend, and co-author of the Reactive Manifesto, said:

“The Reactive Foundation is a critical milestone in bringing together technology industry leaders to embrace a message-driven architecture to support cloud-native applications built to be robust, resilient, flexible and written with modern hardware, virtualization, rich web clients and mobile clients in mind."

More Information

Reactive Foundation

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