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 the to() operator for fluent conversion

On rare occasions, you may find yourself having to pass an Observable to another API that converts it into a proprietary type. This can be done simply by passing an Observable as an argument to a factory that does this conversion. However, this does not always feel fluent, and this is where the to() operator comes in.

For example, JavaFX has a Binding<T> type that houses a mutable value of type T and notifies the affected user interface elements to update when it changes. RxJavaFX has JavaFxObserver.toBinding() and JavaFxSubscriber.toBinding() factories, which can turn an Observable<T> or Flowable<T> into a JavaFX Binding<T>.

Here is a simple JavaFX Application:

Pane root = new Pane();
Label label = new Label("0");
label.setScaleX(2.00);
label.setScaleY(2.00);
label.relocate(40, 40);
root.getChildren()...