I'm Monix.io, Help Wanted!
Monix was started in 2014 with the purpose of aiding me in dealing with processing asynchronous events in a soft real-time system. We’ve come a long way and now the library is better than ever but there’s much to do.
At the time we were using Akka Actors for communications and it soon became apparent that it’s not enough, because often in such a system you’ve got signals coming from multiple sources that need to be merged, state machines have to be evolved and Akka Actors are too low level and too powerful, easily leading to cycles in your communications graph, easily making the flow so complex that it makes it hard to understand what’s going on. And another problem is that working with Akka Actors efficiently must be done with the wisdom of others, best practices, patterns that are sadly missing in the Scala community.
At the time I looked for alternatives and stumbled upon ReactiveX / RxJava. A very solid library built on top of a really cool model, but unfortunately at that point we needed to handle back-pressure and the Scala integration wasn’t there and so at that point in time it wasn’t suitable for our needs. Even now their 1.x line has limitations and design choices that I don’t like. But granted, it’s a very solid library, I’m very grateful for their work and I keep getting inspired by them. And I’ve also been inspired by Scalaz and by Cats. The community is simply great and filled with awesome projects from which to draw inspiration.
Monix has evolved with the help of myself and my colleagues
in response to the needs of the project we’ve been working on,
functioning in a very demanding environment. And now in version 2
it expanded beyond the Observable pattern, to provide other needed
abstractions like Task. It also works on top of Scala.js,
all of it. If something cannot be supported on top of Javascript engines,
then it won’t make it in Monix. Monix’s purpose is to make asynchronous
programming easier and is build in an idiomatic Scala style. I was asked
for example if Monix supports Java and I said: no, not at this point.
And here we are. Monix has been my love child and I’ve loved every minute of working on it. But it has to keep evolving. And one problem it has is one of documentation. It has great API documentation, mind you, but it needs more than that.
So here it is, the start of Monix.io, its documentation website, which I hope to evolve into a useful resource.
HELP WANTED: if you like Monix, if you’re using it, please help us write some useful docs for it. You can start by being inspired from reactivex.io. Oh yes, the inspiration continues, we are a big community ;-)