Push-based Architectures with RxJS

… all this time you have been coding wrong!

Before I can show you HOW to implement Push-Based architectures, I need to first describe WHY Pull-Based solutions are flawed… and WHY Push-Based systems are better.

Most developers learn to program, code, and build software architectures using traditional Pull-based approaches. In the world of web applications and asynchronous, rich user experiences this approach is flawed, rampant with myriad problems, and is fundamentally wrong.

Traditional Pull-Based Solutions

With Pull-based architecture, the views will explicitly call service methods to force-reload (aka ‘pull’) the data. This is the traditional approach employed by most developers.

Consider the simple function call findAllUsers() used to retrieve a list of users… here the code is pulling data to a view. If the user list subsequently changes, views (or services) must issue another pull request with findAllUsers(). But how do the views know when to issue another request?

Notice I have not stated whether the data is currently in-memory or must be retrieved from the server. Nor have I asserted that the pull request is synchronous or asynchronous. Those are irrelevant here since this is still a pull-based approach.

Now it is reasonable to load data or change data asynchronously… using async/await or Promises. Developers may even build a temporary 1-response Observable [like HttpClient] to access remote data.

But those data request are still a single, 1-x pull-request. And Observables used this way are consider temporary streams; discarded after use/completion.