Matthew Podwysocki's Blog

We’ve covered a bit of ground already in this series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS) from the basic information, creating observers and observables, jQuery integration and in the last post talking about composing asynchronous methods with callbacks.  Now that we have some more fundamental building blocks, let’s see what else we can do with it.  Since we talked about asynchronous methods last time and making them composable, how about this time taking a method that is seemingly a blocking AJAX call and turn it into an asynchronous method?  In this post, we’ll finish up the Microsoft Translator example by playing with the getLanguages and getLanguageNames methods and see what we can do with them.

So far in this series, we’ve covered some basic information about the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS) including creating observables and creating observers as well as jQuery integration.  Now that we have a foundation in some of the basic building blocks, let’s actually do something interesting with it.  For example, how would we compose two AJAX calls together with callbacks?  In this post, we’ll explore using the Bing Translator in combination with jQuery and the RxJS.

So far in this series, we’ve discussed the intent of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS) and how to create the publishers (Observables) and subscribers (Observers).  Along the way, we’ve talked a little about integration with other libraries such as jQuery (although we could talk about others) and since JavaScript developers tend to work in quite a few libraries, it’s best to see how we can fit RxJS in those solutions.

Looking back to the previous post, we covered how we create observable sequences, the producers of our data.  We have quite a number of ways of creating these outside of events which we covered earlier.  Now that we have these observable sequences, now what?  We need to address the consumer side of this producer/consumer story in the form of an observer.

In the previous post, we covered a little about the Reactive Framework (Rx) for JavaScript.  Since that time we’ve learned that Jeffrey Van Gogh will be attending the upcoming JSConf 2010 and hoping to bring along some Reactive Extensions for JavaScript for anyone who is interested.

Readers of my blog probably know that I’m a bit into functional programming languages (F#, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, etc) among other topics, but what you may not know is that I’m a huge JavaScript fan as well.  Since I began in the industry (professionally anyways), I’ve been using JavaScript to knock out some pretty interesting solutions.  Over the years, many people have tried to abstract over the language, taking such approaches as taking a statically typed language and compiling it to JavaScript, but when it comes down to it, I prefer dealing with the natural language of the web, which is HTML, CSS and native JavaScript.

The next DC ALT.NET meeting is taking place on 2/24/2010 from 7-9PM.  Stay tuned to the mailing list for more information as it becomes available.  In this meeting, once again we have George Dinwiddie, to give a talk on talk in the language of the business and what tools along the way can help us.  Below is a description of the event.  We hope to see you there!

As announced yesterday, the new February 2010 release of F# is out.  For those using Visual Studio 2008 and Mono, you can pick up the download here.  This release is much more of a stabilization release instead of adding a lot of features including improvements in tooling, the project system and so on.