Spring: Blocking vs non-blocking: R2DBC vs JDBC and WebFlux vs Web MVC

Spring Framework version 5, released in Sept 2017, introduced Spring WebFlux. A fully reactive stack. In Dec 2019 Spring Data R2DBC, a reactive relational database driver was released. In this blog post I'll show that at high concurrency, WebFlux and R2DBC perform better. They have better response times and higher throughput. As additional benefits, they use less memory and CPU per request processed and when leaving out JPA in case of R2DBC, your fat JAR becomes a lot smaller. At high concurrency using WebFlux and R2DBC is a good idea!

Node.js: A simple pattern to increase perceived performance

The asynchronous nature of code running on Node.js provides many interesting options for service orchestration. In this example I will call two translation services (Google and SYSTRAN). I will call both of them quickly after each other (milliseconds). The first answer to be returned, will be the answer returned to the caller. The second answer will be ignored. I've used a minimal set of Node modules for this; http, url, request. Also I wrapped the translation API's to provide a similar interface which allows me to call them with the same request objects. You can download the code here. In the below picture this simple scenario is illustrated. I'm not going to talk about the event loop and the call stack. Watch this presentation for a nice elaboration on those.