What is a Reactive Application?
Reactive Applications are a new class of applications that are becoming more and more prevalent in both Consumer and Enterprise-facing environments. Reactive Applications are fundamentally different to the traditional web-based or mobile applications seen today and are distinguished by having one or more of the following defining traits:
Resilient: The ability to recover and repair itself automatically in order to provide seamless business continuity.
Interactive: Rich, engaging, single page user interfaces that provide instant feedback based on user interactions and other stimuli.
Scalable: Can scale within and across nodes elastically to provide compute power on-demand when it’s needed.
Event-Driven: Enables parallel, asynchronous processing of messages or events with ease.
Historically, the more of these traits required by an application, the more difficult it becomes to take disparate technologies and make them work together; developers first have an integration project on their hands before they can even start developing an application. It is clear that new programming paradigms and tools need to be embraced in order to deliver on the multiple levels of sophistication required to deliver these Reactive Applications.
Typesafe Platform
There is already a production-ready platform in existence today that offers all four traits right out of the box … introducing the Typesafe Platform, the next iteration of the Typesafe Stack, and the world’s first Reactive Platform; built expressly to help software engineers deliver a new generation of reactive applications. The Typesafe Platform is a suite of integrated products consisting of Play Framework, Akka, and Scala, along with the Typesafe Console for command and control.
Typesafe Activator
A new addition to the Typesafe Platform is Typesafe Activator, a unique, browser-based tool that helps developers get started with Typesafe technologies quickly and easily. Getting started is a snap; just download, extract and run the executable to start building applications immediately via the easy to use wizard based interface. Common development patterns are presented through reusable templates that are linked to in-context tutorials which explain step-by-step exactly how things work. The Activator environment supports each stage of the application development lifecycle: Code, Compile, Run, and Test. At the appropriate time, Activator can generate fully-fledged projects for the leading IDEs so that application development can continue in these environments.
The rich developer content in Typesafe Activator is dynamic and customizable. New templates will be published regularly via the upcoming “Template Store” on the Typesafe website.
A Solid Foundation
The Typesafe Platform is uniquely positioned to allow the rapid development of complex user interfaces and enables a new abstraction level for concurrency and parallel task execution, while mitigating risk by ensuring predictability at scale.