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

Chapter 4. Introduction to Backpressure and Flowables

So far, we were trying to understand the push-based architecture of reactive programming. By now, we have gained a good understanding of Observables. We now understand that an Observable emits items to be consumed by an Observer for further processing. However, while going through previous chapters, did you ever think of a situation where the Observable emits items faster than the Observer can consume them? This whole chapter is devoted to this problem. We will start by trying to understand how and when this problem may occur, and then we will try to solve the problem.

So, in this chapter, we will focus on the following topics, and by the end of the chapter we should have a solution to the problem mentioned earlier:

  • Understanding backpressure
  • Flowables and Subscriber
  • Creating Flowables with Flowable.create()
  • Using Observable and Flowables together
  • Backpressure operators
  • An Flowable.generate() operator

So, now, let's start with backpressure—the...