Build robust, highly scalable reactive web applications with Ratpack, the lightweight JVM framework. With this practical guide, you’ll discover how asynchronous applications differ from more traditional thread-per-request systems—and how you can reap the benefits of complex non-blocking through an API that makes the effort easy to understand and adopt.

Author Dan Woods—a member of the Ratpack core team—provides a progressively in-depth tour of Ratpack and its capabilities, from basic concepts to tools and strategies to help you construct fast, test-driven applications in a semantic and expressive way. Ideal for Java web developers familiar with Grails or Spring, this book is applicable to all versions of Ratpack 1.x.

• Configure your applications and servers to accommodate the cloud
• Use Ratpack testing structures on both new and legacy applications
• Add advanced capabilities, such as component binding, with modules
• Explore Ratpack’s static content generation and serving mechanisms
• Provide a guaranteed execution order to asynchronous processing
• Model data and the data access layer to build high-performance, data-driven applications
• Work with reactive and functional programming strategies
• Use distribution techniques that support continuous delivery and other deployment tactics