What would be preferred way of handling Mono or Flux that WebClient returns?
Given you're aiming to use Webflux, the ultimate preferred way is to deal with these publishers the entire way up your reactive chain. This means you won't end up calling subscribe on anything directly, because your controller will itself return a Mono (and everything, including the WebClient calls, will just be incorporated into that Mono via a series of reactive opreations in the chain.)
However, as you point out, you can't realistically migrate everything at once.
If it's only the WebClient that you're migrating for now, then just call block() to treat it the same way as your RestController. There's no advantage with calling subscribe() and then waiting for the subscription to complete - that's just a less obvious and more long-winded way of blocking.
Once you migrate more and more of your stack to reactive, you can do more and more in a reactive fashion, and then start to "move" your block() calls further up the chain as a result (until the block is at the controller level, and then you can just switch over to returning the Mono.)
Also, with subscribe, do we need to handle a Disposable
Only if you need to potentially cancel the subscriber (and it supports it.) This is quite a rare occurance in my experience.
And one more question regarding JDBC. How dangerous is to use Schedulers.boundedElastic()?
boundedElastic() is designed to be a wrapper for blocking IO, so there's nothing inherently wrong with using that on the reactor side. The only "danger" would be on the JDBC / app side as to if it fits your requirements:
- It's capped at 10x the number of CPU cores
- The number of "queued" tasks is capped at 100K
If you've got enough long running DB queries that this isn't enough, then you might consider using newBoundedElastic() instead and specifying the threadCap and queuedTaskCap manually.
What if app uses Tomcat? Is the situation better since Tomcat by default has more threads?
I wouldn't advise relying on it. Tomcat still uses one thread per request (even with Webflux), so the danger there is you end up blocking on a thread you shouldn't, and end up not realising and then relying on that behaviour (which would then all come tumbling down when you switched to Netty.)
