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)

Connecting user interactions and server communication


Now that we have already implemented the observable to listen to user interactions and also a way to communicate with the server, we must now implement three things:

  • A way for the user to provide their name
  • Send messages to the server when a user wishes
  • Show on the screen the incoming messages from the server

To implement this last part of our application that connects the user interactions with the server, we are going to implement the index.js file located in the client folder.

The first thing to implement this is to require the modules we need:

var Rx = require('rx'); 
var connection = require('./connection'); 
var events = require('./events'); 

With these three lines of code we require the RxJS module and the connection and events modules. Now we can ask a user for their name, and we will use a prompt for this:

var logged =  prompt("Please enter your name", ""); 

Now when you run the application and open it in the browser, you will be prompted...