Reactive Programming With Angular RXJS
Reactive Programming With Angular RXJS
Introduction
RxJS is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable
sequences. It provides one core type, the Observable, satellite types (Observer, Schedulers, Subjects)
and operators inspired by Array methods (map, filter, reduce, every, etc) to allow handling
asynchronous events as collections.
ReactiveX combines the Observer pattern with the Iterator pattern and functional programming with
collections to fill the need for an ideal way of managing sequences of events.
The essential concepts in RxJS which solve async event management are:
Observer: is a collection of callbacks that knows how to listen to values delivered by the
Observable.
Subscription: represents the execution of an Observable, is primarily useful for cancelling the
execution.
Operators: are pure functions that enable a functional programming style of dealing with
collections with operations like map, filter, concat, reduce, etc.
Subject: is equivalent to an EventEmitter, and the only way of multicasting a value or event
to multiple Observers.
First examples
Purity
What makes RxJS powerful is its ability to produce values using pure functions. That means your
code is less prone to errors.
Normally you would create an impure function, where other pieces of your code can mess up your
state.
content_copyopen_in_newlet count = 0;
fromEvent(document, 'click')
The scan operator works just like reduce for arrays. It takes a value which is exposed to a callback.
The returned value of the callback will then become the next value exposed the next time the
callback runs.
Flow
RxJS has a whole range of operators that helps you control how the events flow through your
observables.
This is how you would allow at most one click per second, with plain JavaScript:
content_copyopen_in_newlet count = 0;
document.addEventListener('click', () => {
lastClick = Date.now();
});
With RxJS:
fromEvent(document, 'click')
.pipe(
throttleTime(1000),
Values
Here's how you can add the current mouse x position for every click, in plain JavaScript:
content_copyopen_in_newlet count = 0;
count += event.clientX;
console.log(count);
lastClick = Date.now();
});
With RxJS:
fromEvent(document, 'click')
.pipe(
throttleTime(1000),