Last week I gave a couple of talks related to micro-services architecture at DevNexus 2014. The first talk was NodeJS: the good parts? A skeptic’s view (slides), which describes the pros and cons of JavaScript and NodeJS and how NodeJS is useful for building small-ish I/O intensive services such as API gateways and web applications.

The second talk was Futures and Rx Observables: powerful abstractions for consuming web services asynchronously (slides).  This talk first describes how Scala Futures (and forthcoming JDK 8 CompletableFutures) can be used to greatly simplify API gateway code that needs to call multiple backend services concurrently. The talk then describes how Rx Observables (i.e. RxJava) are a more general purpose concurrency abstraction that can be also used to process asynchronous event streams.