Book Image

PHP Reactive Programming

By : Martin Sikora
Book Image

PHP Reactive Programming

By: Martin Sikora

Overview of this book

Reactive Programming helps us write code that is concise, clear, and readable. Combining the power of reactive programming and PHP, one of the most widely used languages, will enable you to create web applications more pragmatically. PHP Reactive Programming will teach you the benefits of reactive programming via real-world examples with a hands-on approach. You will create multiple projects showing RxPHP in action alone and in combination with other libraries. The book starts with a brief introduction to reactive programming, clearly explaining the importance of building reactive applications. You will use the RxPHP library, built a reddit CLI using it, and also re-implement the Symfony3 Event Dispatcher with RxPHP. You will learn how to test your RxPHP code by writing unit tests. Moving on to more interesting aspects, you will implement a web socket backend by developing a browser game. You will learn to implement quite complex reactive systems while avoiding pitfalls such as circular dependencies by moving the RxJS logic from the frontend to the backend. The book will then focus on writing extendable RxPHP code by developing a code testing tool and also cover Using RxPHP on both the server and client side of the application. With a concluding chapter on reactive programming practices in other languages, this book will serve as a complete guide for you to start writing reactive applications in PHP.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
PHP Reactive Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we tried to explain the common programming paradigms used in most programming languages. These were: imperative, declarative and functional programming. We also compared the meanings of asynchronous and parallel code.

We spent some time on practical examples of functional programming in PHP and its downsides, and we went through examples of some not very common features, such as the Closure class.

Then, we examined the definition of reactive programming and how it's related to all we saw previously in this chapter.

We introduced Reactive Extensions (Rx) as a library for one of the possible approaches to reactive programming.

In two examples of RxJS, we saw what working with Reactive Extensions looks like in practice and how this matches our definition of reactive programming.

Finally, we introduced RxPHP, which we'll use throughout this entire book. We also quickly talked about differences between RxPHP 1.x and RxPHP 2.

In the next chapter, we'll have a closer look at various parts of the RxPHP library and talk more about the principles used in Reactive Extensions.