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)

Hot and cold observables

The preceding sections covered most of the factory operators available in RxPY. All of these operators start to emit items at subscription time. This is the default behavior in ReactiveX. Nothing happens until an observer subscribes to an observable. It is the subscription that makes the observable start emitting its items. This behavior is very important to understand when coding with ReactiveX, and it has a name: cold observables. Another behavior of observables is possible: hot observables.

So, what is the difference between cold and hot observables?

Cold and hot observables can be described as similar to the different ways of watching TV shows. Sometimes people watch TV shows on demand, and sometimes people watch TV shows live.

When somebody watches a TV show on demand, the content is sent to his TV only when he effectively asks to view the show (that...