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)

Testing the application


There are several ways that you could create tests for your application; one of the possible options is to create unit tests for your application.

If we decided to create unit tests for our client application, we would need a way to mock the connection with our servers; this would involve creating a new (and slightly complex) build for our tests.

We could also create end to end tests, to test the whole flow of a user. Doing this would probably involve using some external tool to run our tests in the context of a browser and automatize the user input. This would also involve an extra step of running a tool such as Selenium or CasperJS.

There are several books on the different ways you can test a frontend application. Here I'm choosing to implement the simplest solution, which involves creating a page for the test using mocha as explained in Chapter 7, Something is Wrong - Testing and Dealing with Errors.

To do this, let's create a page called index_test.html inside the...