Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

By : Romain Picard
Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

By: Romain Picard

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is central to many concurrent systems, but it’s famous for its steep learning curve, which makes most developers feel like they're hitting a wall. With this book, you will get to grips with reactive programming by steadily exploring various concepts This hands-on guide gets you started with Reactive Programming (RP) in Python. You will learn abouta the principles and benefits of using RP, which can be leveraged to build powerful concurrent applications. As you progress through the chapters, you will be introduced to the paradigm of Functional and Reactive Programming (FaRP), observables and observers, and concurrency and parallelism. The book will then take you through the implementation of an audio transcoding server and introduce you to a library that helps in the writing of FaRP code. You will understand how to use third-party services and dynamically reconfigure an application. By the end of the book, you will also have learned how to deploy and scale your applications with Docker and Traefik and explore the significant potential behind the reactive streams concept, and you'll have got to grips with a comprehensive set of best practices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

The history of asynchronous programming in Python

Since the early days of Python, it has always been possible to do asynchronous programming, but in the old way; that is, by using callbacks. Chapter 1, An Introduction to Reactive Programming, already explained some of the evolution in the frameworks and programming languages that made asynchronous programming easier during the last few years. The Python language naturally followed that trend, and many incremental improvements have been made since the early 2000s. Figure 2.4 shows the history of the main changes that occurred in Python concerning asynchronous programming.

The evolution on the left side are the elements that are still part of Python. The evolution on the right side concerns asynchronous frameworks and one deprecated module of the standard library:

Figure 2.4: The main steps of asynchronous programming in Python...