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)

Batching changes to the DOM


When developing a frontend application, one of the greatest problems for performance is the access to DOM.

Changing or adding nodes in the DOM can have a serious impact on your application's performance.

Using RxJS, we can easily mitigate this problem using buffers to aggregate changes before applying it to the DOM. In our web chat application, every time a user sends a message or you send a message, we need to add a new node in the DOM. Given the nature of our application, we do not expect to receive several messages per second (or the user will not be able to read the messages), but if you were implementing a chart with real-time data, this behavior can quickly become a bottleneck for you.

Here, in this section, we are going to do a minor change to our application so all changes in the DOM are buffered before being applied. I will show this technique as it can be used in several other applications.

In the index.js file we have the following code; we use it to listen...