Book Image

PHP Reactive Programming

By : Martin Sikora
Book Image

PHP Reactive Programming

By: Martin Sikora

Overview of this book

Reactive Programming helps us write code that is concise, clear, and readable. Combining the power of reactive programming and PHP, one of the most widely used languages, will enable you to create web applications more pragmatically. PHP Reactive Programming will teach you the benefits of reactive programming via real-world examples with a hands-on approach. You will create multiple projects showing RxPHP in action alone and in combination with other libraries. The book starts with a brief introduction to reactive programming, clearly explaining the importance of building reactive applications. You will use the RxPHP library, built a reddit CLI using it, and also re-implement the Symfony3 Event Dispatcher with RxPHP. You will learn how to test your RxPHP code by writing unit tests. Moving on to more interesting aspects, you will implement a web socket backend by developing a browser game. You will learn to implement quite complex reactive systems while avoiding pitfalls such as circular dependencies by moving the RxJS logic from the frontend to the backend. The book will then focus on writing extendable RxPHP code by developing a code testing tool and also cover Using RxPHP on both the server and client side of the application. With a concluding chapter on reactive programming practices in other languages, this book will serve as a complete guide for you to start writing reactive applications in PHP.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
PHP Reactive Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction to Reactive Programming

Reactive programming has become a very popular and in demand topic over the last few years, and even though the ideas behind it aren't new, it takes the good parts from multiple different programming paradigms. This book's purpose is to teach you how to start writing PHP applications with principles of reactive programming in mind and in combination with pre-existing libraries.

In this chapter, we'll learn the most important principles that will guide us throughout this entire book:

  • Recap well-known programming paradigms and quickly explain their meaning for humans.

  • We'll see how we can use functional PHP programming, even today, using practical examples. We pay special attention to how we can use anonymous functions.

  • Explain what reactive programing is and what good parts it takes from other programming paradigms.

  • We'll have a look at some examples of widely spread JavaScript and PHP libraries that already use very similar principles to reactive programming.

  • Introduce Reactive Extensions and see how these fit into the world of reactive programming.

  • Show what using Reactive Extensions looks like using RxJS and how it fits into the grand scheme of things.

  • Create a first simple demo with RxPHP library.

Since reactive programming is a programming paradigm, we'll take a quick look at other common paradigms that all of us have probably already heard of and that you'll see mentioned every time you read or hear about reactive programming.