Android改造：使用还是不使用RxAndroid？

Question

I've been searching the best way to do API-calls , and for that, I did some research on the main ways, like Retrofit , Volley , Ion etc, and I'm convinced that Retrofit is really the best. I'm used to use this one since a long time, and I should just move on and live my life, with my mind full of happiness about my past choices, BUT, I only use Retrofit , and its calls treatments, where I usually do my stuff, treating success and error , and it works fine, GG. So, I heard about RxAndroid on Retrofit , and then I got myself in a huge doubt about myself:

Should I implement RxAndroid ?

It's going to make my projects better? What are the benefits of using (or not) it?

Answer 1

I'm guessing you probably mean RxJava in this context. RxJava and Retrofit fit very nicely together....particularly if you need to for example combine execution of different requests. For example say you have following and you want to get token before calling getData

public interface SomeRetrofitServiceInterface {
    @POST("issueToken")
    Observable<String>  issueToken(@Query("subscriptionKey") String subscriptonKey);

    @GET("getSomeData")
    Observable<MyPojo> getData(@Query("token") String token);
}

this is how you can do this using RxJava

service.issueToken(subscriptionKey)
                .subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
                .flatMap(token -> service.getData(token));

Another use case might be where you want to run a number of requests in parallel (eg using Observable.zip() and wait for them all to complete before doing further processing.

Answer 2

If you are already familiar with the whole RX-way of thinking, I would say: give it a try. For me, it made things in my app way easier, but the impact is dependent on how your app is setup.

If you're not familiar with RX, I would suggest you first try to grasp the idea behind it, incorporating it in some small parts in your app, without using it in combination with Retrofit.

And last but certainly not least: Don't use it because it's hip and happening, try it out first, if you find it valuable for your code, keep on using it.

Answer 3

RxJava like each library have same negative affects for performance and size of your application. In this case it is not a big overhead. RxJava is simple and improves the quality of your code. When you start to use it, you will use it in all of your projects.