Principles of Reactive Programming

Week 1: Review of Principles of Functional Programming: substitution model, for-expressions and how they relate to monads. Introduces a new implementation of for-expressions: random value generators. Shows how this can be used in randomized testing and gives an overview of ScalaCheck, a tool which implements this idea.

Week 2: Functional programming and mutable state. What makes an object mutable? How this impacts the substitution model. Extended example: Digital circuit simulation.

Week 3: Futures. Introduces futures as another monad, with for-expressions as concrete syntax. Shows how futures can be composed to avoid thread blocking. Discusses cross-thread error handling.

Week 4: Reactive stream processing.  Generalizing futures to reactive computations over streams. Stream operators.

Week 5: Actors. Introduces the Actor Model, actors as encapsulated units of consistency, asynchronous message passing, discusses different message delivery semantics (at most once, at least once, exactly once) and eventual consistency.

Week 6: Supervision. Introduces reification of failure, hierarchical failure handling, the Error Kernel pattern, lifecycle monitoring, discusses transient and persistent state.

• Martin Odersky
• Roland Kuhn - Typesafe Inc.
• Erik Meijer