Presentation: RxJS: A Better Way to Write Frontend Applications

Everything that happens in a frontend application is asynchronous; events happen - a user types something, a server responds with data - and our programs react. The traditional approach to this problem is to deal with asynchronous "parts" of your application in callbacks or promises, while working with static data structures and behaving as if the rest of the program were synchronous. After years of writing frontend apps, I still find this confusing and cumbersome. But what if we stopped trying to hide what is asynchronous and accepted that none of our data is static? This is the premise of functional reactive programming. We treat data itself as asynchronous - as streams which represent a snapshot a given value over time, and operations that can transform those values. Functional reactive programming is a major conceptual shift but one that can vastly simply frontend programming. You can use it regardless of what platform, or in the case of the web, what javascript MVC you rely on. It's an amazing technique that is the core of my toolbox in writing frontend apps. I want to help demystify it for you, and show you how you can use FRP today!