RxJava

15 November 2017

(This is an excerpt from Modern Java: Second Edition)

RxJava is the open-source library for reactive programming that is part of the ReactiveX project. ReactiveX includes implementations in several different languages including rxjs, RxRuby, RxSwift, RxPHP, RxGroovy and many more.

RxJava 2 was rebuilt to be compatible with the Reactive Streams specification and is preferable to RxJava 1.x since it is scheduled for end-of-life. There were many changes from version 1 to 2 that could be confusing. To avoid confusion we will focus on RxJava 2.

Flowable

The basic entry class in RxJava is io.reactivex.Flowable. It implements the Reactive-Streams Pattern and offers factory methods, intermediate operators and the ability to consume reactive dataflows.

The following example demonstrates using RxJava to do a simple calculation on a range of numbers:

public static List doSquares() {
   List squares = new ArrayList();
   Flowable.range(1, 64) // (1)
       .observeOn(Schedulers.computation()) // (2)
       .map(v -> v * v) // (3)
       .blockingSubscribe(squares::add); // (4)
   return squares;
}

  1. Create a range from 1 to 64.

  2. Call the method observeOn to determine which Scheduler to use. This determines on which Thread the flow will run.

  3. The map method transforms each value. In this case we calculate the square.

  4. Finally, we initiate the flow by calling a “subscribe” method. In this case, blockingSubscribe blocks until the entire flow has completed. This means that the squares list will be populated before the return statement. Otherwise the flow would run on a different thread and the values in the squares list would be unpredictable at any given time.

(This is an excerpt from Modern Java: Second Edition)