Monads are the talk of the town right now, everyone is saying something about them and much of it makes little sense, especially when you try and combine the messages from all of the sources.

This talk will take a different tack. We will have a quick definition of a few terms and concepts, but that will be quick and to the point. Instead I will concentrate on the mechanics of Monads, why you would want to use them at all, how you can use them to solve real problems in different situations, and what we can ask for from our languages and tools to make them even more useful and easy to adopt.

Along the way we will look at many examples in Java 8, and how syntactic constructs ease their use in languages like Scala and Haskell.

In the final episode of the "Deep Dive in to the Typesafe Reactive Platform" series, Nilanjan Raychaudhuri will walk you through building Reactive apps with Akka and Scala. He will expand on both projects and outline how they support the Typesafe Platform.

Beginning with Akka, an asynchronous event-driven runtime implemented in Scala, Nilanjan will demonstrate how the project enables the development of high performance and reliable distributed applications. He'll walk us through how Akka decouples business logic from low-level mechanisms and how, with Akka, you can easily configure how Actors will be created, destroyed, scheduled, and how to deal with failures.

You can get started building Reactive Akka applications using Java APIs. Nilanjan will cover how, when you're ready, the Scala programming language makes building Reactive applications on the JVM less complicated and elegant. Because Scala integrates both functional and object-oriented paradigms and retains full interoperability with your existing Java libraries and infrastructure, you can take advantage of multicore hardware. Consequently, it’s an excellent programming model for Reactive.

Typesafe Activator gets you started with the Typesafe Reactive Platform, Play Framework, Akka and Scala. In this deep dive presentation, we'll walk through the rich developer content in Typesafe Activator, and learn how to get started building reactive apps with Play.

The Play Framework is a modern alternative to legacy Enterprise Java stacks. It focuses on developer productivity, modern web and mobile applications, and predictable, minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) resulting in highly performant, highly scalable applications.

Reactive development is fueling a new wave of business applications; these apps are event-driven, scalable, resilient and responsive by nature. To help developers build Reactive applications on the JVM, Typesafe has brought together the Play web framework, a runtime called Akka, and the Scala language under a unified platform. The platform is distributed through Typesafe Activator, a tool that includes easy-to-use templates and tutorials designed to accelerate adoption and skill acquisition.

The world operates in real time. Anything else is an illusion. Events happen all around us, that is why they are "events”. The days when we can look at synchronous method calls as the only interaction model have been dead for a while. We just never wanted to fully admit it. Well, it’s beyond time to embrace asynchrony. We’ve been doing it all along anyway with protocols and networking! Let’s (re)learn all the lessons from those guys! How did protocols evolve from request/reply, such as HTTP, to more asynchronous protocols, such as WebSocket? What are best practices (and things to avoid) for making applications asynchronous and event driven? How do architectures change when asynchrony is the new normal? What is this loose coupling and why is it good?

About the speaker

Todd L. Montgomery - Chief Architect for Kaazing

Todd is a networking hacker who has researched, designed, and built numerous protocols, messaging-oriented middleware systems, and real-time data systems, done research for NASA, contributed to the IETF and IEEE, and co-founded two startups.

He currently works for Kaazing as Chief Architect.

Timing is everything. If a system does not respond in a timely manner then: at best, its value is greatly diminished; and at worst, it is effectively unavailable. Reactive systems need to meet predictable response time guarantees regardless of load or datasets size, even in the presence of burst traffic and partial failure conditions.

In this talk we will explore what is means to be responsive and the fundamental design patterns required to meet predictable response time guarantees. Queueing theory, Little's Law, Amdahl's Law, Universal Scalability Law - we'll cover the good bits. Then we'll explore algorithms that work with these laws to deliver timely responses from our applications no matter what gets thrown at them.

Martin Thompson - High-performance and low-latency specialist

Martin is a high-performance and low-latency specialist, with experience gained over two decades working on the bleeding edge of large transactional and big-data systems. He believes in Mechanical Sympathy, i.e. applying an understanding of the hardware to the creation of software as being fundamental to delivering elegant high-performance solutions. The Disruptor framework is just one example of what his mechanical sympathy has created.

Martin was the co-founder and CTO of LMAX. He blogs at mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com, and can be found giving training courses on performance and concurrency when he is not cutting code to make systems better.

Reactive applications need to be able to respond to demand, be elastic and ready to scale up, down, in and out—taking full advantage of mobile, multi-core and cloud computing architectures—in real time.

In this talk we will discuss the guiding principles making this possible through the use of share-nothing and non-blocking designs, applied all the way down the stack. We will learn how to deliver systems that provide reactive supply to changing demand.

Jonas Bonér - CTO and co-founder of Typesafe

Jonas Bonér the co-founder and CTO of Typesafe and the inventor of the Akka project. Learn more at: jonasboner.com

Jonas Boner asked me to write an abstract for this talk. We were talking about some of the things I'd learned while building resilient systems. I mentioned a few simple things I knew - he said "Tell them these things, stories from real-life experience are always fun"

I sat on the underground, with my notepad out and started scribbling. The planned title of the talk was 7 things I'd learned about programming. But by the time I got to Kista I had a list of 32 things.

By the time I've written the talk it might be more than 32.

So I'll talk about the K things that I've learned where K >= 32

About the speaker

This person is speaking at this event.

Joe Armstrong - Principal Inventor of Erlang

Joe Armstrong is one of the inventors of Erlang.

When at the Ericsson computer science lab in 1986, he was part of the team who designed and implemented the first version of Erlang. He has written several Erlang books including Programming Erlang Software for a Concurrent World. Joe held the first ever Erlang course and has taught Erlang to hundreds of programmers and held many lectures and keynotes describing the technology.

Joe has a PhD in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is an expert in the construction of fault tolerant systems. Joe was the chief software architect of the project which produced the Erlang OTP system.

He has worked as an entrepreneur in one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail) and has worked for 30 years in industry and research.

What does it mean to be Reactive? The history of reactive programming and why it is not just functional.

React brings together a small but highly influential group of developers to explore and discuss the fundamental principles of the Reactive Manifesto and why they are important for the new generation of systems being developed. There is no call for papers - instead React invited some of the best speakers and thinkers from the industry to share their wisdom about specific traits of the manifesto. So instead of some random selection of loosely connected talks, React presented a coherent journey through the reactive programming stack, trait by trait, UI to database.

Martin Thompson, High-Performance & Low-Latency Computing Specialist and Jonas Bonér, Co-founder & CTO Typesafe presented the React 2014 conference introduction.