Is this still the case? I guess with it hitting 1.0 it's more likely now, but I'd still be interested to hear if anyone's had much experience with this up until now.
In the same page you can find a list of compliant implementations like AKKA or RxJava, so you can easily check out one of them and see how they are implementing these concepts under the hood. The general purpose is good, it makes the switch from framework X to Y easier with the declared goal of provide a standard for asynchronous stream processing with non-blocking back pressure, but, as said before, there's nothing more than that.
About the production, well, some of the listed libraries are widely used, so I guess there are a lot of people actually using this concept in production.
Then, if you want to go further, you can search for Duality, that seems an evolution of Reactive Programming and Reactive Streams.
I think this convention is one for the future and this release marks the start of adoption. I think the hope is that more implementations will come in the future and one goal is to allow the simple connection of reactive streams and allow the building complex distributed systems.
Also interestingly it looks like this concept might make it into jdk9 as Flow - https://github.com/reactive-streams/reactive-streams-jvm/iss...