Have you ever wondered how you can improve the performance of your applications under high load? You've probably heard that reactive design can help meet better response time and make your applications more flexible. In this presentation, I will show that you don’t need to rewrite your Java EE applications from scratch to achieve that!

We’ll go through 5 ways of how to reuse the knowledge of Java EE and Java 8 to improve your existing applications with a reactive design. We’ll apply them to a big production-like application step by step, walking through the code and demonstrating live. In the end, we’ll compare how much the performance and user experience can be improved. All that without learning a new framework or library, and limiting the amount of changes in the application source code to a bare minimum!

This talk was presented at the GeeCON conference in Krakow, Poland, on the 18th of May 2017.