Book Image

Learning RxJava - Second Edition

By : Nick Samoylov, Thomas Nield
Book Image

Learning RxJava - Second Edition

By: Nick Samoylov, Thomas Nield

Overview of this book

RxJava is not just a popular library for building asynchronous and event-based applications; it also enables you to create a cleaner and more readable code base. In this book, you’ll cover the core fundamentals of reactive programming and learn how to design and implement reactive libraries and applications. Learning RxJava will help you understand how reactive programming works and guide you in writing your first example in reactive code. You’ll get to grips with the workings of Observable and Subscriber, and see how they are used in different contexts using real-world use cases. The book will also take you through multicasting and caching to help prevent redundant work with multiple Observers. You’ll then learn how to create your own RxJava operators by reusing reactive logic. As you advance, you’ll explore effective tools and libraries to test and debug RxJava code. Finally, you’ll delve into RxAndroid extensions and use Kotlin features to streamline your Android apps. By the end of this book, you'll become proficient in writing reactive code in Java and Kotlin to build concurrent applications, including Android applications.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Foundations of Reactive Programming in Java
5
Section 2: Reactive Operators
12
Section 3: Integration of RxJava applications
Appendix B: Functional Types
Appendix E: Understanding Schedulers

Using Flowable.generate()

Despite a lot of the content that has been covered so far in this chapter, we have not yet demonstrated the optimal approach to apply backpressure to a source. Although the standard Flowable factories and operators automatically handle the backpressure, the onBackPressureXXX() operators, while quick and effective for some cases, just cache or drop emissions, which is not always desirable. It would be better to force the source to slow down as needed in the first place.

Thankfully, Flowable.generate() exists to help create backpressure, respecting sources at a nicely abstracted level. It accepts a Consumer<Emitter<T>>, much like Flowable.create(), but uses a lambda to specify which onNext(), onComplete(), and onError() events to pass each time an item is requested from the upstream.

Before you use Flowable.generate(), consider making your source...