What is the difference between reactive and reactive flows?

Question

Am I trying to understand the difference between Reactive and ReactiveStreams, especially in the context of RxJava?

The most that I could understand was that Reactive Streams has some concept of backpressure in the specification, but it already exists in RxJava / Reactive with the request(n) interface.

Not against ELI5 answer.

Answer 1

Jet stream design is a collaborative effort by several engineers to define a standard minimum set of components that support (potentially) asynchronous backpressure event delivery (and synchronous shutdown). It mainly influenced RxJava in design along with Akka.

However, the resulting design was significantly different from RxJava, so RxJava 1.x would require a lot of binary incompatible changes to make it compatible. Instead, we have the RxJavaReactiveStreams bridge, and RxJava 2.0 is completely redefined by Reactive-Streams.

I have a four-part blog series on active threads in the light of RxJava.