I am new to reactive concepts and these terminologies are looking similar to me. Am I correct in stating that Spring Reactor, Akka, RxJava are similar but how is this different from gRPC. Can I use Project Reactor with gRPC and RSocket. This is getting overwhelming. How are these related? Any explanation on this will be very much useful to me.
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Am I correct in stating that Spring Reactor, Akka, RxJava are similar
Yes, to a point. Reactor & RxJava are pretty much one and the same, conceptually (though I'm sure I'll attract some stick from at least someone for saying that...!)
Akka is a bit different - it's a more fully featured framework that uses reactive concepts. It's also written in Scala rather than Java, and while it works just fine in Java, it's a reasonably unusual choice in my experience.
how is this different from gRPC
gRPC is a completely different beast - it's a framework meant for connecting different services together. You can build your services in any number of languages, Java included, and then choose whether you make blocking or non-blocking calls to those services from the framework you've constructed (the non-blocking calls could then be trivially interfaced with a reactive framework if that was required.) It's much more similar conceptually to REST / SOAP than it is Reactor or RxJava.
RSocket is different again - it's more a competitor to HTTP for reactive service intercommunication than anything else. It's a communications protocol (rather than a framework) that services can use to inter-communicate, and it's designed specifically to be efficient while supporting reactive semantics at the stream level. RSocket can for example manage flow control, passing backpressure messages between services, to try to ensure upstream reactive services don't overwhelm downstream services - not something you can do with HTTP (at least, not without adding another protocol on top.)
Overall, if you're new to reactive generally and want to start somewhere (and keep in Java land), then my advice would be to stick with Reactor for the time being to avoid getting overwhelmed - it's probably the most used framework in that regard since it's built right into Spring. Once you're familiar with the fundamentals, other related components like RSocket will start to make a lot more sense.
