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

Writing a Reddit reader using RxPHP


This and many upcoming apps we're going to build will be pure CLI apps. That said, it'll be helpful to have some unified library that'll help us with things common in the CLI environment:

The tool of choice for us is going to be Symfony Console component ( http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/console.html ). It's an  open-source library developed along with the Symfony framework, but it's designed to be used independently in any project, which is ideal for us.

It handles everything from inputs to outputs, and on top of that, it comes with a few very nifty helpers as well. In particular, we're going to use the following:

  • Coloring and formatting the console output

  • Splitting a CLI app into multiple independent commands

  • Automatically generating help from an input parameter definition

  • Handling input parameters, including validation and default values

  • Creating a unified set of functions to handle user input

In this example, we're going to use just the first two...