The open source industry gets a new, neutral home in the form of Reactive Foundation for supporting projects enabling reactive programming. The Linux Foundation has announced the Reactive Foundation, with Alibaba, Lightbend, Netifi and Pivotal as initial members.

The foundation also includes the open source RSocket specification, along with programming language implementations.

The aim of reactive programming is to build applications that deliver a consistent user experience irrespective of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance and different end user devices (computers, tablets, smartphones). Reactive programming uses a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, scalability and responsiveness that is required for today’s networked cloud-native applications, independent of their underlying infrastructure.

The Reactive Foundation establishes a formal open governance model and neutral ecosystem for supporting open source reactive programming projects.

RSocket is an open source protocol that builds upon reactive streams to provide application flow control over the network to prevent outages and increase resiliency of applications. It is designed to support reactive programming and today’s modern microservices-based and cloud-native applications as a high-performance replacement of traditional HTTP.

RSocket allows the use of a single connection, through which messages are passed as streams of data. It enables long-lived streams across different transport connections, which is particularly useful for mobile to server communication where network connections drop, switch, and reconnect frequently.