Spring MVC has supported asynchronous request processing flow for sometime now and this support internally utilizes the Servlet 3 async support of containers like Tomcat/Jetty. 

Spring Web Async support

Consider a service call that takes a little while to process, simulated with a delay:

public CompletableFuture<Message> getAMessageFuture() {
    return CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> {
        logger.info("Start: Executing slow task in Service 1");
        Util.delay(1000);
        logger.info("End: Executing slow task in Service 1");
        return new Message("data 1");
    }, futureExecutor);
}

If I were to call this service in a user request flow, the traditional blocking controller flow would look like this:

@RequestMapping("/getAMessageFutureBlocking")
public Message getAMessageFutureBlocking() throws Exception {
    return service1.getAMessageFuture().get();
}

A better approach is to use the Spring Asynchronous support to return the result back to the user when available from the CompletableFuture, this way not holding up the containers thread:

@RequestMapping("/getAMessageFutureAsync")
public DeferredResult<Message> getAMessageFutureAsync() {
    DeferredResult<Message> deffered = new DeferredResult<>(90000);
    CompletableFuture<Message> f = this.service1.getAMessageFuture();
    f.whenComplete((res, ex) -> {
        if (ex != null) {
            deffered.setErrorResult(ex);
        } else {
            deffered.setResult(res);
        }
    });
    return deffered;
}

Using Observable in a Async Flow

Now to the topic of this article, I have been using Rx-java's excellent Observable type as my service return types lately and wanted to ensure that the web layer also remains asynchronous in processing the Observable type returned from a service call.

Consider the service that was described above now modified to return an Observable:

public Observable<Message> getAMessageObs() {
    return Observable.<Message>create(s -> {
        logger.info("Start: Executing slow task in Service 1");
        Util.delay(1000);
        s.onNext(new Message("data 1"));
        logger.info("End: Executing slow task in Service 1");
        s.onCompleted();
    }).subscribeOn(Schedulers.from(customObservableExecutor));
}

I can nullify all the benefits of returning an Observable by ending up with a blocking call at the web layer, a naive call will be the following:

@RequestMapping("/getAMessageObsBlocking")
public Message getAMessageObsBlocking() {
    return service1.getAMessageObs().toBlocking().first();
}

To make this flow async through the web layer, a better way to handle this call is the following, essentially by transforming Observable to Spring's DeferredResult type:

@RequestMapping("/getAMessageObsAsync")
public DeferredResult<Message> getAMessageAsync() {
    Observable<Message> o = this.service1.getAMessageObs();
    DeferredResult<Message> deffered = new DeferredResult<>(90000);
    o.subscribe(m -> deffered.setResult(m), e -> deffered.setErrorResult(e));
    return deffered;
}