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

Using Promises in PHP


While using Reactive Extensions, we think of data as continuous streams that emit data over time. A similar, and probably more familiar, concept is Promises, which represent a single value in the future.

You've probably met Promises in libraries such as jQuery, where it's commonly used to handle responses from an AJAX request. There are multiple implementations in PHP, but the principle is always the same. We're going to use a library called reactphp/promise ( https://github.com/reactphp/promise ), which follows Promises/A proposal ( http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Promises/A ) and adds some extra functionality as well. Since we're going to use this library for this and the next chapter, we will have a look at how to use it.

Install react/promise package via composer:

$ composer require react/promiseWe

We will use two basic classes:

  • Promise: This class represents a result of a deferred computation that will be available in the future.

  • Deferred: This class represents an...