Netifi, Facebook and others team up to advance ‘reactive programming’ technologies

Cloud-native application platform company Netifi Inc. Tuesday said it’s teaming up with some big names, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Facebook Inc., Pivotal Software Inc. and Lightbend Inc. to form the Reactive Foundation, which aims to accelerate the development of new technologies for building microservices-based applications.

One of those technologies is RSocket, an open source application protocol that helps enable something called “reactive programming.” The aim of reactive programming is to build applications that maintain a consistent user experience regardless of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance and different end user devices. It involves using a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, responsiveness and scalability that’s demanded by today’s modern, cloud-native applications.