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I had a great time at NodePDX last week. There were many talks packed into a short span of time and I saw many exciting ideas presented. One topic that seemed particularly useful to me was Chris Meiklejohn's talk on Functional Reactive Programming (FRP).

I have talked and written about how useful promises are. See Promise Pipelines in JavaScript. Promises are useful when you want to represent the outcome of an action or a value that will be available at some future time. FRP is similar except that it deals with streams of reoccurring events and dynamic values.

Here is an example of using FRP to subscribe to changes to a text input. This creates an event stream that could be used for a typeahead search feature:

This creates an event stream from all keyup and change events on the given input. The stream is transformed into a stream of strings matching the value of the input when each event occurs. Then that stream is filtered so that subscribers to inputs will only receive events if the value of the input has a length greater than two.

Streams can be assigned to variables, shared, and used as inputs to create more specific streams. In the example above inputs is used to create two more streams: one that limits the stream so that events are emitted at most every 500 ms and another that takes the throttled stream and drops duplicate values that appear consecutively. So when the final stream, distinct, is consumed later it is guaranteed that events 1) will be non-empty strings with length greater than two, 2) will not occur too frequently, and 3) will not include duplicates.

That stream can be fed through a service via ajax calls to show a live list of results:

Here suggestions is a new stream that has been transformed from strings to search results using the searchWikipedia function. All of jQuery's ajax methods return promises and Bacon.fromPromise() turns a promise into an event stream.

The flatMapLatest transformer builds a new stream from an existing stream and a stream factory - and it only emits events from the last stream created. This means that if the user types slowly and a lot of ajax requests are made responses to all but the last request will be disregarded.

The suggestions stream is ultimately used by calling its onValue method. That adds a subscriber that runs code for every event that makes it all the way through the stream. The result is a list of search results that is updated live as the user types.

There are some other tricks available. It is possible to bind data from an event stream to a DOM element:

This creates a new stream that is pared down to just the query used to produce each set of results. Whenever a result set is rendered the corresponding query will also be output as the text content of the '#query' element. The new stream is converted to a property to make this work. A property is a value that varies over time. The main practical distinction between a property and an event stream is that a property always has a value. In other words a property is continuous while an event stream is discrete. This example provides '--' as the initial value for the new property.

Notice that property binding as shown here is more general than some data binding frameworks in that the destination is not limited to DOM elements and the source is not limited to model instances. This example passes values to the text method of the given jQuery object. It is possible to push data to any method on any object.

Streams can be combined, split, piped, and generally manipulated in all kinds of ways. Properties can be bound, sampled, combined, transformed, or whatever.

I put this code up on JSFiddle so you can try it out and play with it: http://jsfiddle.net/hallettj/SqrNT/

There are several FRP implementations out there. Two that seem to be prominent are Bacon.js and RxJS. The examples above are code from the RxJS documentation that I rewrote with Bacon. That gave me an opportunity to learn a bit about both libraries and to see how they approach the same problem. The original RxJS code is here.

With FRP it is possible to describe complicated processes in a clean, declarative way. FRP is also a natural way to avoid certain classes of race conditions. When I wrote the initial version of the sample code above it worked perfectly on the first try. In my view that is a sign of a very well-designed library.

If you are interested in further reading I suggest the series of tutorials from the author of Bacon. And there is a great deal of information on the RxJS and Bacon Github pages, including documentation and more examples.