Introduction to RxJava

RxJava is an implementation of reactive extension (a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences) ported from the Microsoft .NET world. In 2012, Netflix realized that they needed a paradigm shift since their architecture could not cope with their huge customer base, so they decided to go reactive by bringing the power of the reactive extension to the JVM world; this is how RxJava was born. There are other JVM implementations besides RxJava, such as RxAndroid, RxJavaFX, RxKotlin, and RxScale. This approach gave them the desired boost, and by making it publicly available, it also offered us the opportunity to use it.

RxJava JAR is licensed under the Apache Software License, version 2.0, and available in the central maven repository.

There are a couple of external libraries that make use of RxJava:

• hystrix: A latency and fault-tolerant library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems
• rxjava-http-tail: An HTTP log...