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)

Reagi and other CES frameworks

Back in Chapter 5, Creating Your Own CES Framework with core.async, we looked at an overview of the main differences between core.async and CES. Another question that might have arisen in this chapter is this—how do we decide which CES framework to use?

The answer is less clear than before and often depends on the specifics of the tool being looked at. We have learned about two such tools so far: Reactive Extensions (Rx) encompassing RxJS, RxJava, and RxClojure) and Reagi.

Reactive Extensions is a much more mature framework. Its first version for the .NET platform was released in 2011 and the ideas in it have since evolved substantially.

Additionally, ports for other platforms, such as RxJava, are being heavily used in production by big names such as Netflix.

A drawback of Rx is that if you would like to use it both in the browser and on the...