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

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about multicasting using ConnectableObservable and Subject. The biggest takeaway is that Observable operators result in separate streams of events for each Observer that subscribes to it. If you want to consolidate these multiple streams into a single stream to prevent redundant work, the best way is to call publish() on an Observable to yield ConnectableObservable. You can then manually call connect() to fire emissions once your observers are set up or automatically trigger a connection using autoConnect() or refCount().

Multicasting also enables replaying and caching, so a tardy Observer can receive missed emissions. A Subject object provides a way to multicast and cache emissions as well, but you should only utilize it if existing operators cannot achieve what you want.

In the next chapter, we will start working with concurrency. This...