Mary is a Java Developer Advocate at IBM, specializing in Reactive Java systems. She started working as a software engineer with C and Unix, then got into Java, Open Source, and web development in the new Millennium, and now she is venturing into Reactive, Mobile, and the DevOps space. In her previous incarnations, she worked for several technology product companies in the Route 128 Boston Technology Corridor, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area.

She now resides in the Greater Chicago area, and is an Executive Board member and President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG). She is also an active co-organizer for the Big Data Developers in Chicago, Chicago Cloud, and IBM Cloud Chicago meetup groups. Mary continues to be amazed by how software innovations can dramatically transform our lives. Despite the many challenges in an ever-evolving technical world, she gets energized by the constant change and believes that she has uncovered the pathway to stay young. She can’t wait to see what the next tech wave will be like.

Mary will participate in the technical track with the talk:

Reactive for the Impatient

A Gentle Introduction to Reactive Java Systems

As Java is an object-oriented language that inherently supports the imperative programming style, asynchronicity presents a challenge that can turn the code into nightmare. One way to deal with the complexity of asynchronicity is to introduce reactivity onto the coding level (reactive programming), and/or to handle it on the design and architecture level (reactive systems design).

This talk presents to the audience a few of the major Java-based reactive frameworks and toolkits in the market today, such as RxJava, Spring Reactor, Akka, and Vert,x. It will start by going over the basic tenets of reactive systems, and some examples of the problems that these systems aim to solve. It will discuss the 2 most commonly used Java frameworks for implementing reactive coding - RxJava and Spring Reactor, and will show some code samples. It will then bring the audience to the next level of "reactivity' by introducing 2 reactive frameworks - Akka and Vert.x, which are usually used for implementing reactive microservices. It will draw some comparisons between these 2 frameworks and cite some real-life examples of their usages.

The takeaways for the audience will be an understanding of the key differences between reactive programming versus reactive systems, and the strength and weaknesses of each of the surveyed frameworks.