Chapter 2. Reactive Programming with RxPHP

In this chapter, we're going to have a better look at how we can use PHP's reactive extension library RxPHP. We'll mostly build on what we saw in the previous chapter, but going into greater detail.

In particular, we'll go through the following:

• Various components of RxPHP that we'll use in this and all further chapters.
• We'll quickly have a look at how to read and understand the Rx documentation. In particular, we'll have a look at marble diagrams that explain the functionality of Rx operators.
• List a few basic operators that we'll use throughout the entire book and explain their functionality.
• Write custom operator that decodes JSON strings into their appropriate array representations while properly handling errors.
• Implement a simple script that downloads an HTML page via cURL. Then compare the same approach when utilizing RxPHP.
• How to write a custom Observable for our cURL example.
• We'll dig into RxPHP's source code and see what happens when we use built-in Observables and operators.

Before we look into each part of RxPHP separately, we'll quickly mention some very common terms that we'll use when talking about various aspects of Reactive Extensions.