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

Understanding schedulers

As discussed earlier, thread pools are a collection of threads. Depending on the policy of that thread pool, threads may be persisted and maintained so they can be reused. A queue of tasks is then executed by the threads from that pool.

Some thread pools hold a fixed number of threads (such as a thread created by the computation() method we used earlier), while others dynamically create and destroy threads as needed.

Typically, in Java, you use an ExecutorService as a thread pool. However, RxJava implements its own concurrency abstraction called Scheduler. This defines methods and rules that an actual concurrency provider such as an ExecutorService or actor system must obey. The construct flexibly renders RxJava non-opinionated regarding the source of concurrency.

Many of the default Scheduler implementations can be found in the Schedulers static factory...