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

Retrofit 2 for API calls


Retrofit by Square is one of the most famous and widely used REST clients for Android. It internally uses OkHTTP for HTTP and network calls. The word REST client makes it different from other networking libraries in Android. While most of the networking libraries (Volley, OkHTTP, and others) focus on synchronous/asynchronous requests, prioritization, ordered requests, concurrent/parallel requests, caching, and more. Retrofit gives more attention to making network calls and parsing data more like method calls. It simply turns your HTTP API into a Java interface. And it doesn't even try to solve network problems by itself, but delegates this to OkHTTP internally.

So, how does it transform an HTTP API into a Java interfaces? Retrofit simply uses a converter to serialize/deserialize POJO (plain old Java object) classes into/from JSON or XML. Now, what is a converter? Converters are those helper classes that parse JSON/XML for you. A converter generally uses the Serializable...