Reactive Programming with RxJava

Foreword

On October 28, 2005, the then newly appointed chief architect of Microsoft, Ray Ozzie, emailed a now infamous memo to his staff with the subject “The Internet Services Disruption”. In this memo, Ray Ozzie outlines basically how the world looks today where enterprises like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix use the Web as the main delivery channel for their services.

From a developer perspective, Ozzie made a rather remarkable statement for an executive of a large corporation:

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

First of all, we have to take into account that in 2005, the big IT enterprises were deeply in love with mind-blowingly complicated technologies like SOAP, WS-*, and XML. This was a time where the word “microservice” was not yet invented, and there was no simple technology on the horizon to help developers manage the complexity of asynchronously composing complex services from smaller ones, and dealing with concerns such as failure, latency, security, and efficiency.

For my Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft, Ozzie’s memo was a rude wakeup call to focus on inventing a simple programming model for building large scale asynchronous and data-intensive Internet service architectures. After many false starts it finally dawned on us that by dualizing the Iterable/Iterator interface for synchronous ...