Book Image

Learning RxJava

By : Thomas Nield
Book Image

Learning RxJava

By: Thomas Nield

Overview of this book

RxJava is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using Observable sequences for the JVM, allowing developers to build robust applications in less time. Learning RxJava addresses all the fundamentals of reactive programming to help readers write reactive code, as well as teach them an effective approach to designing and implementing reactive libraries and applications. Starting with a brief introduction to reactive programming concepts, there is an overview of Observables and Observers, the core components of RxJava, and how to combine different streams of data and events together. You will also learn simpler ways to achieve concurrency and remain highly performant, with no need for synchronization. Later on, we will leverage backpressure and other strategies to cope with rapidly-producing sources to prevent bottlenecks in your application. After covering custom operators, testing, and debugging, the book dives into hands-on examples using RxJava on Android as well as Kotlin.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Why Kotlin?


Kotlin strives to be a pragmatic and industry-focused language, seeking a minimal (but legible) syntax that expresses business logic rather than boilerplate. However, it does not cut corners like many concise languages. It is statically typed and performs robustly in production and yet is speedy enough for prototyping. It also works 100% with Java libraries and source code, making it feasible for a gradual transition.

Android developers, who were stuck on Java 6 until recently, were quick to adopt Kotlin and effectively make it the "Swift of Android". Funnily, Swift and Kotlin have a similar feel and syntax, but Kotlin came into existence first. On top of that, a Kotlin community and ecosystem of libraries continued to grow quickly. In 2017, Google announced Kotlin as an officially supported language to develop Android apps. Due to JetBrains and Google's commitment, it is clear Kotlin has a bright future in the JVM.

But what does Kotlin have to do with RxJava? Kotlin has many useful...