A brief history of Project Reactor

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Reactive Streams specification makes reactive libraries compatible with each other and has also resolved the backpressure problem by introducing the pull-push data exchange model. Despite the significant improvements introduced by the Reactive Streams specification, it still only defines APIs and rules, and does not offer a library for everyday use. This chapter covers one of the most popular implementations of the Reactive Streams specification, Project Reactor (or Reactor for short). However, the Reactor library has evolved a lot since its early versions and has now become the most state-of-the-art reactive library. Let's look at its history to see how the Reactive Streams specification has shaped the API and implementation details of the library.