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)

Creating Your Own CES Framework with core.async

In the previous chapter, it was alluded to that core.async operates at a lower level of abstraction when compared to other frameworks, such as RxClojure or RxJava. This is because, most of the time, we have to think carefully about the channels we are creating, as well as what types and sizes of buffers to use, whether we need pub/sub functionality, and so on.

Not all applications require such level of control, however. Now that we are familiar with the motivations and main abstractions of core.async, we can embark on writing a minimal CES framework, using core.async as the underlying foundation.

By doing so, we avoid having to think about thread pool management, as the framework takes care of that for us.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Building a CES framework using core.async as its underlying concurrency...