What's the difference between Reactive and Reactive Streams?

Question

I'm trying to understand the difference between Reactive and ReactiveStreams, specifically in the context of RxJava ?

The most I could figure out was that Reactive Streams has some notion of backpressure in the specification but that already exists in RxJava/Reactive with the request(n) interface.

Wouldn't mind a ELI5 answer.

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 21 '15 at 09:52

22

The design of Reactive Streams was a joint effort from several engineers to define a standard minimum set of components that support (potentially) asynchronous event delivery with backpressure (and synchronous cancellation). It was mainly influenced by RxJava in its design along with Akka.

However, the resulting design was significanlty different from RxJava so RxJava 1.x would require a lot of binary-incompatible changes to make itself compliant. Instead, we have an RxJavaReactiveStreams bridge and RxJava 2.0 was reimplemented by Reactive-Streams norms completely.

I have a four part blog series about Reactive-Streams in the light of RxJava.

answered Dec 21 '15 at 09:52

akarnokd

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Thanks for the blog post! – Setheron Dec 21 '15 at 16:43
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so which one to use? – user1870400 Aug 10 '16 at 00:15
So reactive streams and Rx Java are independent libraries ? Or One is is using another ? – Rajanikanta Pradhan Nov 15 '20 at 11:09
RxJava 2 and later implement the Reactive Streams (RS) specification and provide a rich set of operators to work with in practice. RS is a set of interfaces and rules to be implemented. An analogue would be `java.util.List` for RS and `java.util.ArrayList` for RxJava. – akarnokd Nov 16 '20 at 09:30

What's the difference between Reactive and Reactive Streams?

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