Explain RxJS Like I'm Five

#explainlikeimfive #javascript

caubeen Jul 19, 2018 ・1 min read

Discussion

You have a pipe that lets you run values through it, one at a time, but at any given time. You can push things through it (observer.next(thing)) at one end and have one or more watcher function look at them on the other end (observable.subscribe(watcher)).

That single pipe alone is not very powerful, but a) you can have as many of these as you want and b) you also have other special pipes, called operators, which you can connect to this pipes in order to do much more powerful things with them, for example combine the stuff of multiple pipes, filter them, wait for things to fall in place and so on. Not to forget c), you also get functions to create those pipes from usual asynchronous actions, like events or Promises.