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 unsubscribeOn()

One last concurrency operator that we need to cover is unsubscribeOn(). Disposing of an Observable can be an expensive (in terms of the time it takes) operation, depending on the nature of the source. For instance, if the Observable emits the results of a database query using RxJava-JDBC, (https://github.com/davidmoten/rxjava-jdbc), it can be expensive to dispose of because it needs to shut down the JDBC resources it is using. This can cause the thread that calls dispose() to become busy. If this is a UI thread in JavaFX or Android (for instance, because a CANCEL PROCESSING button was clicked), this can cause undesirable UI freezing.

Here is a simple Observable that is emitting every second. We stop the main thread for 3 seconds and then call dispose() to shut the operation down. Let's use doOnDispose() (which will be executed by the disposing...