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

Coroutines


Path breaking and, probably, the most exciting feature in Kotlin are coroutines. They are a new way to write asynchronous, non-blocking code somewhere like the threads, but way more simple, efficient, and lightweight. Coroutines were added in Kotlin 1.1 and are still experimental, so think before using it in production.

In the later chapters of this book, you'll learn about Schedulers in RxKotlin, which encapsulates the complexities of threading, but you can use it only in RxKotlin chain, while you can use coroutines anywhere and everywhere. That is indeed a path-breaking feature of Kotlin. They provide a great abstraction on threads, making context changes and concurrency easier.

Keep in mind that RxKotlin does not use coroutines yet; the reason is quite simple–both coroutines and Schedulers in RxKotlin share nearly the same internal architecture; while coroutines are new, Schedulers have been there for a long time with RxJava, RxJs, RxSwift, and more.

Coroutines are the best fit...