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

The future of ReactiveX and Kotlin

Kotlin is a powerful and pragmatic language. JetBrains put a lot of effort into not only making it effective but also compatible with existing Java code and libraries. Despite a few rough patches such as SAM lambda inference, they did a phenomenal job making Java and Kotlin work together. However, even with this solid compatibility, many developers were eager to migrate entirely to Kotlin to leverage its functionality. Named parameters, optional parameters, nullable types, extension functions, inline functions, delegates, and other language features make Kotlin attractive for exclusive use.

JetBrains has also successfully made Kotlin compliable with JavaScript and will soon support Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) native compilation. Libraries built in pure Kotlin can potentially be compiled to all these platforms. To solidify Kotlin's position...