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

Thinking reactively

Suspend everything you know about Java (and programming in general) for a moment, and let's make some observations about our world. These may sound like obvious statements, but as developers, we can easily overlook them. Try to become aware of the fact that everything is in motion. Traffic, weather, people, conversations, financial transactions, and so on are constantly changing or moving through stages.

Technically, even something as stationary as a rock is in motion, as its spatial location changes constantly due to the earth's rotation and orbiting through space. When you consider the possibility that everything can be modeled as being in motion, you may find it a bit overwhelming as a developer.

Another observation to note is that these different events are happening concurrently. Multiple activities are happening at the same time. Sometimes,...