Reactive Programming with RxJava

Chapter 8. Case Studies

Tomasz Nurkiewicz

This chapter shows examples of selected use cases of RxJava in real-life applications. The API of Reactive Extensions is very powerful but there must be a source of Observables somewhere. Creating an Observable from scratch can be challenging due to backpressure and the Rx contract, which must be followed. The good news is that there are many libraries and frameworks out there that support RxJava natively. Also RxJava turned out to be very useful on some platforms that are inherently asynchronous.

Throughout this chapter, you will see how RxJava improves the design and enhances the capabilities of existing architectures. We will also explore more complex topics that can arise when deploying reactive applications to production, such as memory leaks. When you’ve finished this chapter, you should be convinced that RxJava is mature and versatile enough to implement a variety of use cases in real, modern applications.

Android Development with RxJava

RxJava is very popular among Android developers. First, graphic user interfaces are inherently event driven, with events coming from various actions like key presses or mouse movements. Second, Android, just like Swing or many other GUI environments, is very unforgiving when it comes to threads. The main Android thread should not be blocked to avoid freezing the user interface; however, all updates to the user interface must happen in that main thread. These issues will be addressed in “Schedulers ...