React 2014 : Dave Thomas - A Glimpse Through the Reactive Telescope

The Reactive Manifesto and React 2014 have officially launched the reactive journey promising to take us to new worlds that have an applications nirvana which is event-driven, scalable, resilient and responsive! The manifesto presents a well-articulated challenge to how most applications are built today, and at the very least, already has a strong hold foothold in the application space. The Alpha Geeks are already landing on their chosen reactive world - Rx, Clojure Async, FRP, Erlang, Akka, Event Sourcing, Streaming, etc. - speaking in different dialects.

Will we need a babble fish or is this truly a better way? This talk is a brief pragmatic journey in time through reactive epoch from its origins in flow and reactive programming to a not so distant speculative future. Along the way we will attempt to answer the important pragmatic questions: What is it? What is or isn't it good for? How much is a free reactive lunch? How reactive should our applications be? How reactive should I be?