Learning what it means to fetch data reactively

In the previous chapter, we covered a lot of the basics needed to build a web page reactively, except we were missing a vital ingredient: real data.

Real data comes from databases.

There are few applications that don’t use a database to manage their data. And in this era of e-commerce sites serving global communities, there has never been a broader choice of various types of databases, be they relational, key-value, document, or whatever.

This can make it tricky to pick the right one for our needs. It’s even harder considering that even a database needs to be accessed reactively.

That’s right. If we don’t access our database using the same reactive tactics introduced in the previous chapter, all of our efforts would be for naught. To repeat a key point: all parts of the system must be reactive. Otherwise, we risk a blocking call tying up a thread and clobbering our throughput.

Project Reactor...