Reactiveness is an Intellij plugin that provides the capability of automate refactoring Android AsyncTask code to Reactive Programming.
AsyncTask for many years was an easy way for Android programmers to handle short operations without freezing the UI, dealing with threads. An AsyncTask is defined by a computation that runs on a background thread and whose result is published on the UI thread. Due to lot of drawbacks, AsyncTask was deprecated in Android API level R.
Reactive Extension (aka Rx or ReactiveX) is a library for creating asynchronous and event base
applications. ReactiveX is a combination of observer and iterator design patterns. Merge the advantage of iterators with
the flexibility of event based asynchronous programming.
Rx libraries for well-known programming languages and platforms:
Rx offers an easy way to handle the thead where each step will run. By default, an Observable and the chain of operators that you apply to it will do its work, and will notify its observers, on the same thread on which its Subscribe method is called. The SubscribeOn operator changes this behavior by specifying a different Scheduler on which the Observable should operate. The ObserveOn operator specifies a different Scheduler that the Observable will use to send notifications to its observers.
Observable will run on the Ui thread:
Observable will run on the blue thread due to SubscribeOn(blue):
gradlew buildPlugin
gradlew runIde
The plugin refactors only inner & anonymous AsyncTask classes on the current state. Standalone AsyncTask classes will be added to next version.