Book Image

Reactive Programming in Kotlin

By : Rivu Chakraborty
Book Image

Reactive Programming in Kotlin

By: Rivu Chakraborty

Overview of this book

In today's app-driven era, when programs are asynchronous, and responsiveness is so vital, reactive programming can help you write code that's more reliable, easier to scale, and better-performing. Reactive programming is revolutionary. With this practical book, Kotlin developers will first learn how to view problems in the reactive way, and then build programs that leverage the best features of this exciting new programming paradigm. You will begin with the general concepts of Reactive programming and then gradually move on to working with asynchronous data streams. You will dive into advanced techniques such as manipulating time in data-flow, customizing operators and provider and how to use the concurrency model to control asynchronicity of code and process event handlers effectively. You will then be introduced to functional reactive programming and will learn to apply FRP in practical use cases in Kotlin. This book will also take you one step forward by introducing you to Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2 using Kotlin. By the end of the book, you will be able to build real-world applications with reactive user interfaces as well as you'll learn to implement reactive programming paradigms in Android.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Fundamentals of functional programming


Functional programming consists of few new concepts such as lambdas, pure functions, high-order functions, function types, and inline functions, which we will be learning. Quite interesting, isn't it?

Note

Note that, although in many programmers word, pure functions and lambdas are the same, they are actually not. In the following part of this chapter, we will learn more about them.

Lambda expressions

Lambda or lambda expressions generally mean anonymous functions, that is, functions without names. You can also say a lambda expression is a function, but not every function is a lambda expression. Not every programming language provides support for lambda expressions, for instance, Java didn't have it until Java 8. The implementations of lambda expressions are also different in respect to languages. Kotlin has good support for lambda expressions and implementing them in Kotlin is quite easy and natural. Let's now take a look at how lambda expressions work...