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

Understanding Schedulers


You will likely not use schedulers like this in isolation as we are about to do in this section. You are more likely to use them with observeOn() and subscribeOn(). But here is how they work in isolation outside of an Rx context.

A Scheduler is RxJava's abstraction for pooling threads and scheduling tasks to be executed by them. These tasks may be executed immediately, delayed, or repeated periodically depending on which of its execution methods are called. These execution methods are scheduleDirect() and schedulePeriodicallyDirect(), which have a few overloads. Below, we use the computation Scheduler to execute an immediate task, a delayed task, and a repeated task as shown below:

import io.reactivex.Scheduler;
import io.reactivex.schedulers.Schedulers;

import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public class Launcher {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Scheduler scheduler = Schedulers.computation();

        //run task now
        scheduler.scheduleDirect...