Netflix: Solving Big Problems with Reactive Extensions (Rx)

More good news for Reactive Extensions (Rx).

Just yesterday, we told you about improvements we’ve made to two Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., releases: Rx and ActorFx, and mentioned that Netflix was already reaping the benefits of Rx.

To top it off, on the same day, Netflix announced a Java implementation of Rx, RxJava, was now available in the Netflix Github repository. That’s great news to hear, especially given how Ben Christensen and Jafar Husain outlined on the Netflix Tech blog that their goal is to “stay close to the original Rx.NET implementation” and that “all contracts of Rx should be the same.”

Netflix also contributed a great series of interactive exercises for learning Microsoft's Reactive Extensions (Rx) Library for JavaScript as well as some fundamentals for functional programming techniques.

Rx as implemented in RxJava is part of the solution Netflix has developed for improving the processing of 2+ billion incoming requests a day for millions of customers around the world.

To summarize, here’s a great quote from Ben Christensen on the Netflix Tech Blog about Rx:

“Functional reactive programming with RxJava has enabled Netflix developers to leverage server-side concurrency without the typical thread-safety and synchronization concerns. The API service layer implementation has control over concurrency primitives, which enables us to pursue system performance improvements without fear of breaking client code.”