So you're a Developer and you've heard of Reactive and are excited to see how you can use its guiding principles to make your application more responsive and resilient. In this workshop we'll take you through step by step how to transform your application into a truly reactive system that gracefully handles failure, elastically distributes resources and is responsive to your end users.

With the advances in hardware, containerization, and virtualization technology within the past decade, software such as reactive systems is catching up to take advantage of such. Implementing reactive systems and writing code using the reactive approach may sound difficult, but we will illustrate that this can be done in a very manageable manner. While reactive system is not a "one-size-fits-all" cure to all problems, it does seem promising to be a solution to computing challenges such as system responsiveness, resiliency, and scalability.

This workshop will provide a guidance on how to transform a legacy, monolithic, on-premise application into a modern, highly responsive, microservices and cloud-based system. We will utilize the IBM Stock Trader application (https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/introducing-stocktrader/) and work through building a few sample microservices together using an open-source reactive library (such as Eclipse Vert.x or RxJava).

We will first have a quick study of the Stock Trader application in its legacy monolithic form, which can only be deployed as an on-premise app. This will help us to understand the common issues that face a lot of the legacy applications today.

Next, we will discuss about how to redesign the monolithic Stock Trader application, and break up the different components of the system into microservices, using a reactive approach where appropriate.

Participants will then get some hands-on reactive implementation experience by selecting one or more microservices, and work on their implementations with guided examples.

Participants will be able to also deploy their transformed application to Minishift or OpenShift on an open Cloud platform (such as the IBM Cloud). For ease of deployment, the workshop materials will include a fully implemented solution, so that the participant can utilize any of the sample microservices that s/he will need, or simply take the entire sample application, in order to try out the cloud deployment.