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)

The architecture of the server


To implement the features we described before, we will use a simple architecture, and we will need only three files on our source code.

The first one is the index.js file containing the initialization of our WebSocket server and receiving the messages from the chat users; the data from each user will be implemented as an observable. All data passed through this observable will call the service responsible for that message, and the attribute service of each message will contain the name of the service.

All services are going to be implemented in a single file, called services.js; each service in this file might return an observable and, in the case of an observable being returned, our client will start to listen to messages from that observable. Initially we will have only four services:

  • sendMessage(): This service sends message to the connected clients; it can be a private message or a broadcast message. The attribute of the message will contain the receiver of...