In the last article of the series we started building a game Rx.js and Web Speech just like I did at the JavaScript hackathon at Active Dublin 2016.

The game is a variation of the popular typing game where words fall off the screen and you need to type them before they get to you. The slight variation consists in changing the game mechanics from typing to speaking. In our game, letters will fall off the screen and the player will need to say a word starting with that letter to earn points, destroy the letter and avoid certain annihilation.

At the end of the last article we had completed the beginnings of a game with a beautiful black background and some letters falling off the screen. Let’s continue building our game by adding some player interaction through the Web Speech API!

Last week… or was it two weeks ago?… wo! Time flies!… Two weeks ago I was at Active Solution spring conference at Dublin. The topic of the conference was JavaScript (yippiii!) and we organized a hackathon for all employees to experiment with their JavaScript skills and build something cool over the weekend using music, sound or speech APIs.

It was a super fun experience and every team had something to show at the final reckoning in the demo sessions. My personal favorite (and the winner) was a virtual fly that sprang to life when you connected several devices together and started buzzing as it randomly flied through a crowded room to everyone’s delight (or almost everyone XD).

I, myself, worked as a coach during the Hackathon so I couldn’t fully participate with any team. I did sneak some hours though and attempted to build something cool with Rx.js and Web Speech.

This is the story of… Say What Maddafackaaaaaaa!! - The Game… Behold!!

The first talk about Reactive Extensions I listened to was in 2010 at a .NET conference in Sweden. Back then it looked like an awesome way to write ultra-responsive (in the fast-to-respond sense) WPF applications. I watched in awe as the speaker demonstrated how to magically orchestrate a throng of diverse asynchronous operations into one beautiful, declarative and concise set of instructions.

I watched it then, admired it and never saw it again, never used it myself, not even once. Yep… that happens sometimes :)

Fast-forward to today and it feels like Rx.js is exploding (EXPLODIIIING!!!), with frameworks like cycle.js that let you build applications right on top of Rx.js or Angular2 that has chosen Rx.js as its core async pattern.

But what is Rx.js, why is it so popular and ever so useful?

Let’s find out

UPDATE (22th May 2017): This tutorial has been updated to the latest version of Angular (Angular 4). Note that the Angular team has re-branded the terms Angular 2 to Angular and Angular 1.x to AngularJS which are now the official names of these frameworks.

This is the sixth article on the Getting Started with Angular 2 Step by Step series if you missed the previous articles go and check them out!

Good day! Today we are going to wrap up this introductory series to Angular 2 with a look at how to retrieve real data from a web service using the http module in Angular 2. We’ll also learn a little bit about Observables and Rxjs (the new async weapon of choice in Angular 2) along the way.

Let’s get started!