Reactive Spring Boot With Coroutines and Virtual Threads [Workshop]

Urs Peter - Xebia / Jeroen Rosenberg - Xebia

If you want to get the most out of Spring Boot in terms of low latency, high throughput, and resource efficiency, there’s no way around Spring Boot’s reactive stack WebFlux. However, the price you pay in terms of WebFlux code’s complexity, readability, and maintainability is rather high and will likely give you a lot of headaches.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how Spring Boot’s coroutine support will wipe out all the downsides of the ‘raw’ WebFlux approach and provide you with the best of both worlds: reactive characteristics without the complexity.

You’ll also explore Kotlin’s reactive building blocks, provided by the coroutines API, and apply them in Spring Boot. By building a reactive API in Spring Boot from scratch, you’ll learn how to:

• Perform non-blocking remote API calls using WebClient.
• Access a relational database with the reactive R2DBC driver.
• Apply parallelism in your business logic.
• Write and test reactive API endpoints.
• Use virtual threads in combination with coroutines

By the end of the workshop, you’ll know all the ins and outs of reactive programming in Spring Boot with coroutines, as well as the benefits they offer over the WebFlux abstractions Mono and Flux.

Furthermore, you’ll explore Project Loom’s virtual threads and see how they fit into the picture. You’ll also learn how virtual threads can further leverage the power of coroutines.