Spring-Reactive samples - Mono and Single

This is just a little bit of a learning from my previous post where I had tried out the Spring's native support for  reactive programming.

Just to quickly recap, my objective was to develop a reactive service which takes in a request which looks like this:

{
 "id":1,
  "delay_by": 2000,
  "payload": "Hello",
  "throw_exception": false
}

and returns a response along these lines:

{
  "id": "1",
  "received": "Hello",
  "payload": "Response Message"
}

I had demonstrated this in two ways that the upcoming Spring's reactive model supports, using the Reactor-Core Flux type as a return type and using Rx-java Observable type

However the catch with these types is that the response would look something like this:

[{"id":"1","received":"Hello","payload":"From RxJavaService"}]

Essentially an array, and the reason is obvious - Flux and Observable represent zero or more asynchronous emissions and so Spring Reactive Web framework has to represent such a result as an array.

The fix to return the expected json is to essentially return a type which represents 1 value - such a type is the Mono in Reactor-Core OR a Single in Rx-java. Both these types are as capable as their multi-valued counterparts in providing functions which combine, transform their elements.

So with this change the controller signature with Mono looks like this:

@RequestMapping(path = "/handleMessageReactor", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public Mono<MessageAcknowledgement> handleMessage(@RequestBody Message message) {
  return this.aService.handleMessageMono(message);
}

and with Single like this:

@RequestMapping(path = "/handleMessageRxJava", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public Single<MessageAcknowledgement> handleMessage(@RequestBody Message message) {
  return this.aService.handleMessageSingle(message);
}

I have the sample code available in my github repo