Functional Reactive Programming
Stephen Blackheath
- 360 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Functional Reactive Programming
Stephen Blackheath
About This Book
Summary Functional Reactive Programming teaches the concepts and applications of FRP. It offers a careful walk-through of core FRP operations and introduces the concepts and techniques you'll need to use FRP in any language.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Today's software is shifting to more asynchronous, event-based solutions. For decades, the Observer pattern has been the go-to event infrastructure, but it is known to be bug-prone. Functional reactive programming (FRP) replaces Observer, radically improving the quality of event-based code. About the Book Functional Reactive Programming teaches you how FRP works and how to use it. You'll begin by gaining an understanding of what FRP is and why it's so powerful. Then, you'll work through greenfield and legacy code as you learn to apply FRP to practical use cases. You'll find examples in this book from many application domains using both Java and JavaScript. When you're finished, you'll be able to use the FRP approach in the systems you build and spend less time fixing problems. What's Inside
- Think differently about data and events
- FRP techniques for Java and JavaScript
- Eliminate Observer one listener at a time
- Explore Sodium, RxJS, and Kefir.js FRP systems
About the Reader Readers need intermediate Java or JavaScript skills. No experience with functional programming or FRP required. About the Authors Stephen Blackheath and Anthony Jones are experienced software developers and the creators of the Sodium FRP library for multiple languages. Foreword by Heinrich Apfelmus. Illustrated by Duncan Hill. Table of Contents
- Stop listening!
- Core FRP
- Some everyday widget stuff
- Writing a real application
- New concepts
- FRP on the web
- Switch
- Operational primitives
- Continuous time
- Battle of the paradigms
- Programming in the real world
- Helpers and patterns
- Refactoring
- Adding FRP to existing projects
- Future directions
Frequently asked questions
Information
Chapter 1. Stop listening!
- What FRP is
- What events are, and how they cause trouble
- What FRP is for: the problem weâre trying to solve
- The benefits of FRP
- How an FRP system works
- A different way of thinking that underlies FRP
1.1. Project, meet complexity wall
- Itâs shelved.
- Itâs rewritten from scratch, and a million dollars later, it hits the same wall again.
- The company staffs up. As the team expands, its productivity shambles off into the realm of the eternal quagmire. (Often the company has been acquired around this time.)
- It undergoes major refactoring, leading eventually to maintainable code.
1.2. What is functional reactive programming?
- Itâs a replacement for the widely used observer pattern, also known as listeners or callbacks.
- Itâs a composable, modular way to code event-driven logic.
- Itâs a different way of thinking: the program is expressed as a reaction to its inputs, or as a flow of data.
- It brings order to the management of program state.
- Itâs something fundamental: we think that anyone who tries to solve the problems in the observer pattern will eventually invent FRP.
- Itâs normally implemented as a lightweight software library in a standard programming language.
- It can be seen as a complete embedded language for stateful logic.
1.2.1. A stricter definition
Iâm glad youâre starting by asking about a specification rather than implementation first. There are a lot of ideas floating around about what FRP is. For me itâs always been two things: (a) denotative and (b) temporally continuous. Many folks drop both of these properties and identify FRP with various implementation notions, all of which are beside the point in my perspective.By âdenotative,â I mean founded on a precise, simple, implementation-independent, compositional semantics that exactly specifies the meaning of each type and building block. The compositional nature of the semantics then determines the meaning of all type-correct combinations of the building blocks.