ReactiveX

Distributed systems often utilize multithreading, event-based communication and nonblocking I/O to improve the overall system efficiency. These programming techniques impose challenges such as low-level threading, synchronization, thread safety, concurrent data structures, and non-blocking I/O. The open source ReactiveX library beautifully abstracts away these concerns, provides the required application plumbing, and extends the observable pattern on streams of asynchronous events. ReactiveX also has an active developer community and supports a growing list of languages, the most recent addition being RxSwift. It also implements binding to mobile and desktop platforms.

The reactive architecture keeps spreading across platforms and paradigms simply because it solves a common problem in an elegant way, hiding inevitable application plumbing in a nice encapsulation.

Reactive Programming deals with streams or values that change over time. Using elements of data flow, implicit concurrency and transparent event propagation, these techniques enable efficient handling of events on a large scale with a high degree of efficiency and low latency. In the previous radar, we mentioned Reactive Extensions in .NET due to the extensive work done by Microsoft in making Rx a core part of the .NET framework. Since then, with the introduction of the Reactive Cocoa library for Objective C, the Java port of Reactive Extensions, the React JavaScript library, the Elm language based on Haskell & the Flapjax JavaScript library, we are extending this blip to include Reactive Extensions across languages.