Today, I’ve released next version of my most popular open-source project - ReactiveNetwork. I’ve released version 0.12.4 for RxJava1.x and version 1.0.0 for RxJava2.x. Please note, RxJava1.x is no longer officially supported and I’m going to follow the same approach in my RxJava-based projects. It’s not the first release of this project, but I’m breaking the API and removing existing methods, so I decided to stick to proper versioning standard. I didn’t always do it properly in the past, but it’s never too late.

Realization I have tech debt

Except for bumping dependencies and organizational stuff, I’ve decided to reduce tiny technical debt I created over the time. I kept adding many customizations for observing Internet connectivity and end up having many variants of the same methods with different parameters like these:

Observable<Boolean> observeInternetConnectivity(int interval, String host, int port, int timeout)
Observable<Boolean> observeInternetConnectivity(int initialIntervalInMs, int intervalInMs, String host, int port, int timeout)
Observable<Boolean> observeInternetConnectivity(final int initialIntervalInMs, final int intervalInMs, final String host, final int port, final int timeoutInMs, final ErrorHandler errorHandler)
Observable<Boolean> observeInternetConnectivity(final InternetObservingStrategy strategy)
Observable<Boolean> observeInternetConnectivity(final InternetObservingStrategy strategy, final String host)
Single<Boolean> checkInternetConnectivity(InternetObservingStrategy strategy)
Single<Boolean> checkInternetConnectivity(String host,int port, int timeoutInMs)
Single<Boolean> checkInternetConnectivity(String host, int port, int timeoutInMs, ErrorHandler errorHandler)
Single<Boolean> checkInternetConnectivity(final InternetObservingStrategy strategy, final String host)

It’s flexible approach, but it has a few drawbacks:

  • API users could make mistakes during the usage (especially while providing different parameters of the same type)
  • Code readibility is bad
  • Code is hard to maintain
  • Code is hard to extend (in particular cases it may be even impossible)
  • Unit testing is not convenient

That situation leads us into technical debt. It’s kind of shame and I don’t want to have it in my personal open-source projects, which I can almost totally control.

Paying the tech debt

How to fix this situation? Luckilly, this library is tiny and we can fix it with the Builder Design Pattern. This pattern should be applied in each situation in which we have methods with many parameters and part of these parameters may be optional. I’ve decided to create InternetObservingSettings class with internal class representing Builder - InternetObservingSettings.Builder. I haven’t used traditional builder pattern there. I used approach proposed by David Moten, which you can check in https://github.com/davidmoten/java-builder-pattern-tricks repository. It’s cool trick, which makes code nice to use for the end user.

Now, when we want to customize Internet Observing Settings, we can do it as follows:

InternetObservingSettings settings = InternetObservingSettings
    .initialInterval(initialInterval)
    .interval(interval)
    .host(host)
    .port(port)
    .timeout(timeout)
    .errorHandler(testErrorHandler)
    .strategy(strategy)
    .build();

ReactiveNetwork.observeInternetConnectivity(settings)
        .subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
        .observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread())
        .subscribe(new Consumer<Boolean>() {
          @Override public void accept(Boolean isConnectedToInternet) {
            // do something with isConnectedToInternet value
          }
        });

Of course, all parameters are optional. We can do the same for another method returning Single RxJava2 type:

Single<Boolean> single = ReactiveNetwork.checkInternetConnectivity(settings);

Now, I could finally remove old methods. Full library source and documentation can be found at: https://github.com/pwittchen/ReactiveNetwork. That’s it!

I hope my library will be more convenient for users with custom implementation requirements now.

Last, but not least - If you want to contribute to this project, you’re more than welcome! :-)