Book Image

Mastering Reactive JavaScript

By : Erich de Souza Oliveira
Book Image

Mastering Reactive JavaScript

By: Erich de Souza Oliveira

Overview of this book

If you’re struggling to handle a large amount of data and don’t know how to improve your code readability, then reactive programming is the right solution for you. It lets you describe how your code behaves when changes happen and makes it easier to deal with real-time data. This book will teach you what reactive programming is, and how you can use it to write better applications. The book starts with the basics of reactive programming, what Reactive Extensions is, and how can you use it in JavaScript along with some reactive code using Bacon. Next, you’ll discover what an Observable and an Observer are and when to use them.You'll also find out how you can query data through operators, and how to use schedulers to react to changes. Moving on, you’ll explore the RxJs API, be introduced to the problem of data traffic (backpressure), and see how you can mitigate it. You’ll also learn about other important operators that can help improve your code readability, and you’ll see how to use transducers to compose operators. At the end of the book, you’ll get hands-on experience of using RxJs, and will create a real-time web chat using RxJs on the client and server, providing you with the complete package to master RxJs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Chapter 10. A Real-Time Server

In the last chapter, we covered an advanced topic in functional reactive programming, called the transducer. Transducers enable us to create a composition of transformations of data. One of the main advantages of transducers is the possibility of making your data transformations independent from the source of your data; with the transducers-js library we can use transducers on observables and in any iterable object.

With transducers, we can:

  • Write better tests as it make it easy to decouple the source of the data to the transformations applied to it
  • Improve the performance of our code; as it skips the need for any intermediate iterable
  • Improve the maintainability of your code, when we compose transformations to create new transformations we can reuse them throughout our codebase, and avoiding code repetition is a good idea

Throughout this book, we have learned:

  • What are observables?
  • What is an operator?
  • How can we listen to incoming data?
  • How can we transform incoming...