Functional Reactive Programming

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.

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

1. Stop listening!
2. Core FRP
3. Some everyday widget stuff
4. Writing a real application
5. New concepts
6. FRP on the web
7. Switch
8. Operational primitives
9. Continuous time
10. Battle of the paradigms
11. Programming in the real world
12. Helpers and patterns
13. Refactoring
14. Adding FRP to existing projects
15. Future directions