Visiting Reactor Netty
Recently, I set out to learn about how Spring WebFlux works under the hood, I stumbled upon Reactor-Netty and I learned a lot along the way, even though I had worked with both Reactor and Netty in the past. I have therefore decided to write two articles, the first of which is an introduction to Reactor Netty, the second would be dedicated to Spring WebFlux.
Reactor Netty is an asynchronous event-driven network application framework. It provides non-blocking and backpressure-ready TCP, HTTP, and UDP clients and servers. As the name indicates, it’s based on the popular Netty framework.
It is highly recommended that you read A Tour of Netty or any other article discussing the Netty framework in detail before reading this article.
In order to make next sections easier to read and understand, I would like to introduce a few Reactor Netty handlers before diving into Reactor Netty.
Reactor Netty Handlers
At it’s core, Netty uses event-based paradigm, a pipeline is composed of multiple channel handlers responsible for processing events.
