RxJava for Android App Development

RxJava is hot property among experienced Android developers these days, but this powerful library for handling asynchronous data in Android apps can be difficult to learn. In this O’Reilly report, mobile software engineer Matt Dupree introduces you to RxJava basics and then uses a real-world scenario to demonstrate how this library makes quick work of tasks that can often become messy and inflexible.

Short for Reactive Extensions for the JVM, RxJava uses functional programming to make asynchronous data handling in Android apps cleaner and more flexible. As you’ll discover, the FRP paradigm can be hard for people used to imperative programming, but the payoff is enormous. RxJava lets you represent any operation as an asynchronous data stream that can be created on any thread and consumed by multiple objects.

Although you might have some trouble following the code at first, you’ll still see why RxJava provides many advantages over traditional ways of handling asynchronous data in Android applications. It’s the development prescription you’ve been looking for.