Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

By : Romain Picard
Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

By: Romain Picard

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is central to many concurrent systems, but it’s famous for its steep learning curve, which makes most developers feel like they're hitting a wall. With this book, you will get to grips with reactive programming by steadily exploring various concepts This hands-on guide gets you started with Reactive Programming (RP) in Python. You will learn abouta the principles and benefits of using RP, which can be leveraged to build powerful concurrent applications. As you progress through the chapters, you will be introduced to the paradigm of Functional and Reactive Programming (FaRP), observables and observers, and concurrency and parallelism. The book will then take you through the implementation of an audio transcoding server and introduce you to a library that helps in the writing of FaRP code. You will understand how to use third-party services and dynamically reconfigure an application. By the end of the book, you will also have learned how to deploy and scale your applications with Docker and Traefik and explore the significant potential behind the reactive streams concept, and you'll have got to grips with a comprehensive set of best practices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Introduction to AsyncIO

AsyncIO is the official asynchronous framework for Python. As explained in the previous section, this does not mean that it is the only one available. Twisted and Gevent are two other asynchronous frameworks that are very famous. However, since its release in Python 3.4, AsyncIO has become very popular rather quickly. There is no doubt that one reason for this success comes from the philosophy of Python: There should be only one obvious way to do something. Since AsyncIO is part of the standard library, it is the de facto way to do asynchronous programming in Python. Another reason is probably that it was released with the correct timing, when developers regained interest in asynchronous programming.

AsyncIO relies on three entities:

  • Futures: They represent values that will be available later
  • Coroutines: They allow you to execute asynchronous actions
  • ...