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)

Installing dependencies


To implement the client application for our web chat application, we will try to keep the dependencies to the minimum required; we are doing so to encourage you to avoid abusing the use of the library on your application and also to show how powerful a well structured application using RxJS for functional reactive programming can be.

To keep the code simple and avoid adding too many configurations, we are going to use browserify to bundle our client.

The browserify is a bundler that lets us use commonJS when implementing client-side applications. This means we can import data from different files/modules using require in the same way you do on Node.js applications.

To use browserify we must install it as a dependency in our application; to do this, we must run the following command on the folder of our application:

npm i [email protected] --save-dev

With browserify, we can already bundle our application in a single JavaScript file.

We will not add a minifier for our JavaScript...