옵저버 패턴에서 Kotlin 흐름 API의 도출

초록

Kotlin Flow is an asynchronous reactive stream library developed on top of Kotlin coroutine’s suspending functions. Recently, many reactive applications have increasingly adopted the Kotlin Flow instead of the well-known, but nevertheless heavy-weight, RxJava because it provides back-pressure support naturally by using coroutine’s suspending functions. However, the workings of the Flow API are difficult for most programmers to understand. One of the main reasons is due to the ignorance of the fact that its API is originated from the Observer Pattern, as well as its inherent reactive nature. In this paper, we show that Kotlin Flow API is nothing but a reactive version of the adapted Observer Pattern, together with Kotlin coroutines, by step-by-step illumination of how its API is derived from both the Observer Pattern and Kotlin’s coroutine.

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