Reactive Functional programming has a lot of promise and even more hype, but introducing a totally new framework can be very invasive and may only be feasible for green field projects.
While most of us love exploring new technologies and methodologies, in reality we are often stuck with adding features and bugfixes on old code, so we’re excluded from putting these into practice. This is a fundamental problem: On one hand, we can’t refactor old code to fit the newest paradigms all the time, but in the long run we also cannot keep writing vintage style code if we want to remain relevant.
Is there a middle road? Rx ‘Reactive eXtensions’ was initially developed by Microsoft and subsequently ported to many JVM languages by Netflix. RxJava is a regular library and does not require a new framework or methodology to be introduced all across the board. In this talk we’ll examine how we can incrementally start using Reactive Extensions, and, equally important, incrementally start reaping benefits.
Reactive Functional programming can improve the overall design of API’s, it can improve performance, and it can reduce memory footprint.