Reactive programming is poised to be a breakthrough on the scale of object-oriented programming. Once you learn reactive techniques, you will combine streams of events in exciting new ways and wonder how you ever lived without this technique.

Reactive functional programming allows us to manage callback and client state in asynchronous JavaScript code by structuring our complex asynchronous applications as a composition of very simple functions. The result is simpler, more maintainable code.

In this session, we’ll dive into the observable data type introduced via the reactive extensions for JavaScript library (Rx.js). You’ll see how the idea of an observable as a collection over time allows us to use tools we’re already familiar with to manipulate collections.Reactive functional programming with Rx.js is largely framework-independent. You can adopt the library as-is, or use one of the many integrations with various web-frameworks.

We’ll also look at how we used a reactive approach in the Red Hat JBoss Middleware Keynote demo, and how these same techniques can be used in an angular.js client application. By the end of the session, you’ll have an understanding of the benefits of the reactive approach, and know how you can adopt the reactive tools in your own applications.