Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Clojure - Second Edition

By : Konrad Szydlo, Leonardo Borges
Book Image

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Clojure - Second Edition

By: Konrad Szydlo, Leonardo Borges

Overview of this book

Reactive Programming is central to many concurrent systems, and can help make the process of developing highly concurrent, event-driven, and asynchronous applications simpler and less error-prone. This book will allow you to explore Reactive Programming in Clojure 1.9 and help you get to grips with some of its new features such as transducers, reader conditionals, additional string functions, direct linking, and socket servers. Hands-On Reactive Programming with Clojure starts by introducing you to Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) and its formulations, as well as showing you how it inspired Compositional Event Systems (CES). It then guides you in understanding Reactive Programming as well as learning how to develop your ability to work with time-varying values thanks to examples of reactive applications implemented in different frameworks. You'll also gain insight into some interesting Reactive design patterns such as the simple component, circuit breaker, request-response, and multiple-master replication. Finally, the book introduces microservices-based architecture in Clojure and closes with examples of unit testing frameworks. By the end of the book, you will have gained all the knowledge you need to create applications using different Reactive Programming approaches.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Identifying problems with our current approach

Aside from the lines of code responsible for building the user interface, our program is roughly 48 lines long.

The core of the program resides in the share-price and avg functions, which are responsible for querying the price service and calculating the average of a list of n numbers, respectively. They represent only six lines of code. There is a lot of incidental complexity in this small program.

Incidental complexity is complexity that's caused by code that is not essential to the problem at hand. In this example, we have two sources of such complexity: the thread pool and the rolling buffer function (we are disregarding UI-specific code for this discussion). They add a great deal of cognitive load to someone reading and maintaining the code.

The thread pool is external to our problem. It is only concerned with the semantics...