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

Using Flowable.generate()


A lot of the content we covered so far in this chapter did not show the optimal approaches to backpressure a source. Yes, using a Flowable and most of the standard factories and operators will automatically handle backpressure for you. However, if you are creating your own custom sources, Flowable.create() or the onBackPressureXXX() operators are somewhat compromised in how they handle backpressure requests. While quick and effective for some cases, caching emissions or simply dropping them is not always desirable. It would be better to make the source backpressured in the first place.

Thankfully, Flowable.generate() exists to help create backpressure, respecting sources at a nicely abstracted level. It will accept a Consumer<Emitter<T>> much like Flowable.create(), but it will use a lambda to specify what onNext(), onComplete(), and onError() events to pass each time an item is requested from the upstream.

Before you use Flowable.generate(), consider...