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

Chapter 11. RxJava on Android

If there is one domain that reactive programming has taken by storm, it is definitely mobile apps. As discussed throughout this book, ReactiveX is highly useful for many domains. But mobile apps are becoming increasingly complex, and users have a short tolerance for apps that are unresponsive, slow, or buggy. Therefore, mobile applications were quick to be early adopters of ReactiveX to solve these problems. RxSwift has quickly become popular on iOS after RxJava got a foothold on Android. There are also RxAndroid and RxBinding libraries to integrate RxJava easily with the Android environment, which we will cover in this chapter.

One of the pain points that Android developers have coped with for some time is being stuck with Java 6. This means that many of the widely used versions of Android (KitKat, Lollipop, and Marshmallow) do not support Java 8 lambdas (although this changed in Android Nougat, which finally uses OpenJDK 8). At first glance, this means you...