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)

RxJS observables


RxJS lets you have even more control over the source of your data. In this section, we will learn the differences between RxJS Observables and bacon.js EventStreams and Properties. We will also learn some different flavors of Observables and how we can better control their life cycle.

Difference between bacon.js and RxJS observables

In Chapter 2, Reacting for the First Time, you learned that an observable is basically an abstraction over possible asynchronous data. The observable gives you the power to transform data using different operators and take an action when a piece of new data becomes available, using a subscriber. The bacon.js library uses the term subscriber to the object listening to incoming data, but on Reactive Extensions, we will use a different term; we will call it Observer.

Conceptually, there is no difference between the two. Basically, it was just names chosen by the developers of both libraries; however, it is important that you're aware of both the names...