BehaviorSubject vs Observable?

Question

I\'m looking into Angular RxJs patterns and I don\'t understand the difference between a BehaviorSubject and an Observable.

From my underst

Answer 1

Observable: Different result for each Observer

One very very important difference. Since Observable is just a function, it does not have any state, so for every new Observer, it executes the observable create code again and again. This results in:

The code is run for each observer . If its a HTTP call, it gets called for each observer

This causes major bugs and inefficiencies

BehaviorSubject (or Subject ) stores observer details, runs the code only once and gives the result to all observers .

Ex:

JSBin: http://jsbin.com/qowulet/edit?js,console

// --- Observable ---
let randomNumGenerator1 = Rx.Observable.create(observer => {
   observer.next(Math.random());
});

let observer1 = randomNumGenerator1
      .subscribe(num => console.log('observer 1: '+ num));

let observer2 = randomNumGenerator1
      .subscribe(num => console.log('observer 2: '+ num));


// ------ BehaviorSubject/ Subject

let randomNumGenerator2 = new Rx.BehaviorSubject(0);
randomNumGenerator2.next(Math.random());

let observer1Subject = randomNumGenerator2
      .subscribe(num=> console.log('observer subject 1: '+ num));
      
let observer2Subject = randomNumGenerator2
      .subscribe(num=> console.log('observer subject 2: '+ num));

Output :

"observer 1: 0.7184075243594013"
"observer 2: 0.41271850211336103"
"observer subject 1: 0.8034263165479893"
"observer subject 2: 0.8034263165479893"

Observe how using Observable.create created different output for each observer, but BehaviorSubject gave the same output for all observers. This is important.

---

Other differences summarized.

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃         Observable                  ┃     BehaviorSubject/Subject         ┃      
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ 
┃ Is just a function, no state        ┃ Has state. Stores data in memory    ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
┃ Code run for each observer          ┃ Same code run                       ┃
┃                                     ┃ only once for all observers         ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
┃ Creates only Observable             ┃Can create and also listen Observable┃
┃ ( data producer alone )             ┃ ( data producer and consumer )      ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
┃ Usage: Simple Observable with only  ┃ Usage:                              ┃
┃ one Obeserver.                      ┃ * Store data and modify frequently  ┃
┃                                     ┃ * Multiple observers listen to data ┃
┃                                     ┃ * Proxy between Observable  and     ┃
┃                                     ┃   Observer                          ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛