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 went through two larger topics. We'll use both of them in the next chapter, where we'll write multithreaded applications with pthreads, as well as distributed applications with Gearman.

The two topics we covered were multicasting in RxPHP and all operators related to it, and using the PHP7 pthreads v3 extension to write multithreaded PHP7 applications.

Multicasting in Rx is very useful in order to share a single connection to source Observables without resubscribing. This comes with the refCount() operator to work more easily with ConnectableObservables.

Multithreaded programming in PHP is possible with the pthreads extension. However, it's not as simple as it seems, and there are multiple caveats, most importantly insufficient documentation and an overall unintuitive approach. In the next chapter, we'll use just the most basic functions from pthreads to avoid confusion and eventual inconsistency with future updates of pthreads. The goal for the next chapter is to...