Now that we are acquainted with RxJava and have even written a few reactive workflows, let's look at its history to recognize the context in which reactive programming was born and the problems it was designed to solve.
Curiously, the RxJava history and the history of reactive programming as we know it today began inside of Microsoft. In 2005, Erik Meijer and his Cloud Programmability Team were experimenting with programming models appropriate for building large-scale asynchronous and data-intensive internet service architectures. After some years of experimenting, the first version of the Rx library was born in the summer of 2007. An additional two years were devoted to different aspects of the library, including multithreading and cooperative re-scheduling. The first public version of Rx.NET was shipped on November 18, 2009. Later...