Conquering Concurrency: Bringing the Reactive Extensions to the Android Platform

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It’s no secret that concurrency is a hard problem to solve. Yet, even in 2013, we’re only beginning to make larger strides towards programming models that drastically simplify dealing with concurrency – and most of the time, this is happening in the server side world.

If you look at your average Android app, however, you will notice that it’s highly concurrent: screens are backfilled with data coming from web services, the local database, or both. The UI needs to reflect changes to the data model, so handling concurrent messages is a task left to the developer.

Matthias Kappler believes that right now on Android, dealing with concurrency is too hard, and by extension too error prone. Luckily, Netflix has recently started to bring .NET’s “Reactive Extensions”/Rx to the Java platform, enabling developers to write asynchronous, message based applications using functional reactive programming.

At SoundCloud, they’ve taken Rx out of the server space and into the clients, in order to make writing highly concurrent Android apps a breeze.

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