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

Introduction to concurrency


The definition of concurrency can be described as follows:

As a programming paradigm, concurrent computing is a form of modular programming, namely factoring an overall computation into subcomputations that may be executed concurrently.                                                                                                                                – Wikipedia

As the definition says, concurrency is all about breaking the entire task into small parts and then executing them concurrently (there's a small difference between concurrent execution and parallel execution, which we will discuss shortly).

So, what does it mean to execute subcomputations concurrently? Let's look at a real-life example. Think of a situation where you're cooking a new dish at your home and you have three chores—bring the spices, cut the vegetables, and also marinate something. Now, if you're doing it all alone, you have to do them one by one, but if you have a family member at your...