reacto

Reactive Programming for Ruby with some concurrency thrown into the mix!

How to install?

If you use bundler just add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'reacto'

Alternatively you can instal the gem with gem install reacto or clone this repository and play with it!

Why?

Because it is very cool to be reactive these days! Seriously - to be reactive means that your code is able to react on changes happening in various places right away. For example third party data sources or other parts of the code. It helps writing multy-component apps which could handle failures and still be availale.

Of course there are other implemenations of reactive programming for ruby:

  • RxRuby : Very powerful implemenation of RX. Handles concurrency and as a whole has more features than Reacto. So why Reacto? Reacto has simpler interface it is native Ruby lib and is easier to use it. The goal of Reacto is to be competitor to RxRuby in the ruby world. Still the author of reacto is big fan of RX especially RxJava. He even has a book on the topic using RxJava : Learning Reactive Programming with Java 8
  • Frappuccino : Very cool lib, easy to use and simply beautiful. The only drawback - it is a bit limitted : no concurrency and small set of operators. But if you don't need more complicated operators it is the best. The author of Reacto highy recommends it.