An update on the 5th and last milestone of Spring Framework 5.0...
Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux
The name *Spring MVC* is both well known and widely used but it may surprise a few there is no actual project or independent distribution with that name. Rather it is a module within the Spring Framework distribution called `spring-webmvc`. Here is another trivia question. Did you know that the top-level package in the module does not feature "mvc"? Rather it is called `org.springframework.web.servlet`. Practically speaking those are details that we don't have to remember. What matters is that we have a short and memorable name to refer to *Spring's Servlet stack based* web framework.
Spring's reactive stack web framework, new in 5.0, is fully reactive and non-blocking. It is suitable for event-loop style processing with a small number of threads. It is supported on Servlet containers (Tomcat, Jetty, Servlet 3.1+) but also non-Servlet runtimes (Netty, Undertow) since the common foundation for this stack is not the Servlet API but a non-blocking alternative built on Reactive Streams and the Reactor project. In case you're wondering, isn't Servlet 3.1 capable of non-blocking I/O…