Is the following code with Vert.x really reactive? - mongodb

Question

Do I have a wrong understanding of "reactive" or is something wrong in my example?
I did a small code sample in Vertx: In a REST service I read data from mongodb and returning as JSON.
...........
Router router = Router.router(vertx);
router.route().handler(BodyHandler.create());
router.get("/gilders").handler(this::listAll);
vertx.createHttpServer().requestHandler(router::accept).listen(8080);
}
private void listAll(RoutingContext routingContext) {
mongoClient.find("gliders", new JsonObject(), results -> {
List<JsonObject> objects = results.result();
/* is this non blocking?!
mongoClient.find return immediately, but the rest client just
gets results, after mongo delivered all results
*/
List<Glider> gilder = objects.stream()
.map(res -> {
Glider g = new Glider();
g.setName(res.getString("name"));
g.setPrice(res.getString("price"));
return g;
})
.collect(Collectors.toList());
routingContext.response()
.putHeader("content-type", "application/json; charset=utf-8")
.end(Json.encodePrettily(gilder));
});
}
OK, its not blocking, I could compute something else meanwhile waiting for mongo.
But somehow I thought about "reactive" is that the REST client will get already the first chunks of the mongo results even mongo is still not ready finding all by that time (HTTP Streaming). But like this, the callback is just invoked, when mongo found all results.

Answer 1

Reactive is not the same as streaming. Reactive is a concept around data flows, your application will react to events, e.g.: data returned from mongoDB. You can now implement streaming on top of it by asking the mongo client to start pumping data asap as it arrives from the network. However in a blocking API you could do streaming by blocking the application for data and then pass it one by one to a consumer.