Book Image

C++ Reactive Programming

By : Praseed Pai, Peter Abraham
Book Image

C++ Reactive Programming

By: Praseed Pai, Peter Abraham

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is an effective way to build highly responsive applications with an easy-to-maintain code base. This book covers the essential functional reactive concepts that will help you build highly concurrent, event-driven, and asynchronous applications in a simpler and less error-prone way. C++ Reactive Programming begins with a discussion on how event processing was undertaken by different programming systems earlier. After a brisk introduction to modern C++ (C++17), you’ll be taken through language-level concurrency and the lock-free programming model to set the stage for our foray into the Functional Programming model. Following this, you’ll be introduced to RxCpp and its programming model. You’ll be able to gain deep insights into the RxCpp library, which facilitates reactive programming. You’ll learn how to deal with reactive programming using Qt/C++ (for the desktop) and C++ microservices for the Web. By the end of the book, you will be well versed with advanced reactive programming concepts in modern C++ (C++17).
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

From Design patterns to Reactive programming


Even though the design pattern movement is aligned with OOP, and reactive programming is aligned towards FP, there are close similarities between them. In a previous chapter(Chapter 5Introduction to Observables), we learned the following:

  • The OOP model is good for modeling the structural aspects of a system.
  • The FP model is good for modeling the behavioral aspects of a system.

To illustrate the connection between OOP and reactive programming, we will write a program that will traverse directories to enumerate files and sub-folders within a given folder.

We will create a composite structure that contains the following:

  • A FileNode (inherits from the abstract class  EntryNode) that models file information
  • A DirectoryNode (inherits from the abstract class  EntryNode) that models folder information

After defining the preceding Composites, we will define Visitors for the following:

  • Printing filenames and folder names
  • Converting a composite hierarchy to a list...