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)

Creating the project


We will implement the backend of our web chat application in the node, so the first thing is to create a folder to store our project and, inside this folder, start the project using the following command:

npm init

This command will ask you for a lot of metadata for the project. You can leave all the defaults in force, just hitting Enter until the end. After this we need to install some libraries we will use to implement our project; the first one is RxJS, and to install it you must type the following command:

npm install [email protected] --save

We also need a library to implement our WebSocket server: we will use the most famous library to implement WebSocket in JavaScript socket.io with the following command:

npm install [email protected] --save

We will use express to serve the HTML page of our client, so we need to install it:

npm install --save [email protected]

Lastly, we need a runner to execute the tests of our application, and for this we will install mocha with the following command...