13 Facts About Reactive programming

In computing, reactive programming is a declarative programming paradigm concerned with data streams and the propagation of change.

Reactive programming has been proposed as a way to simplify the creation of interactive user interfaces and near-real-time system animation.

Example, in a model–view–controller architecture, reactive programming can facilitate changes in an underlying model that are reflected automatically in an associated view.

Usually, reactive programming languages expect such cycles to be "broken" by placing some element along a "back edge" to permit reactive updating to terminate.

Sometimes the term reactive programming refers to the architectural level of software engineering, where individual nodes in the data flow graph are ordinary programs that communicate with each other.

Reactive programming can be purely static where the data flows are set up statically, or be dynamic where the data flows can change during the execution of a program.

Reactive programming could be said to be of higher order if it supports the idea that data flows could be used to construct other data flows.

One inherent problem for reactive programming is that most computations that would be evaluated and forgotten in a normal programming language, needs to be represented in the memory as data-structures.

Reactive programming has principal similarities with the observer pattern commonly used in object-oriented programming.

Such a set-up is analogous to imperative constraint programming; however, while imperative constraint programming manages bidirectional data-flow constraints, imperative reactive programming manages one-way data-flow constraints.

Object-oriented reactive programming is a combination of object oriented programming and reactive programming.

Functional reactive programming is a programming paradigm for reactive programming on functional programming.

An example of a rule based reactive programming language is Ampersand, which is founded in relation algebra.