Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 14. Programming with Reactive Extensions

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

- Albert Einstein

It's beautiful when we give a new dimension to thinking while solving a problem. In programming, our approaches to solving problems may differ from each other. Most of the time, there's an interaction between the user and programs. GUI-based and web applications are a few examples of these applications. We can think of ways in which our application gets notified whenever the user tries to interact with it. It may be possible that our program awaits user's interactions or vice versa. In the opposite case, the user's interaction, at times, notifies the application of some kind of event. Let's say we write our programs to react to a user's interactions. This is the essence of being reactive as an application program. We write a program that acts as a system to the surrounding environment, and the environment itself pushes events to our programs...