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

Debugging RxJava code

RxJava is not easy to debug at first glance, primarily due to the lack of debugging tools and the large stack traces it can produce. Attempts are underway to create effective debugging tools for RxJava, most notably the Frodo library for Android (https://github.com/android10/frodo). We will not cover any debugging tools for RxJava as nothing has been standardized quite yet, but we will learn about an effective approach that you can take to debug reactive code.

A common theme in debugging RxJava operations is finding the bad link or the operator in the Observable/Flowable chain that is causing the problem. Whether an error is being emitted, onComplete() is never being called, or an Observable is unexpectedly empty, you often have to start at the beginning of the chain at the source and then validate each step downstream until you find the one not working correctly...