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RxJava is an implementation of Reactive Extensions – a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences for the Java VM.

It extends the observer pattern to support sequences of data/events and adds operators for composing sequences together declaratively while abstracting away low-level threading, synchronization, thread-safety, concurrent data structures, non-blocking IO and other such concerns.

It supports Java 5 or higher and JVM based languages such as Groovy, Clojure, Scala and JRuby.

Why?

futures ... easy to compose but not efficient (blocking)

callbacks ... efficient (non-blocking) but hard to compose (nested callbacks, error handling, etc)

reactive ... efficient (non-blocking) and composable

More Information

• Optimizing the Netflix API
• Reactive Programming at Netflix
• rx.codeplex.com
• Channel 9 MSDN videos on Reactive Extensions
• Your Mouse is a Database
• Beginner's Guide to the Reactive Extensions
• Wikipedia: Reactive Programming
• Wikipedia: Functional Reactive Programming
• Tutorial: Functional Programming in Javascript
• What is (functional) reactive programming?
• Rx Is now Open Source