Cats

Cats

Fetch is built using Cats' Free monad construction and thus works out of the box with cats syntax. Using Cats' syntax, we can make fetch declarations more concise, without the need to use the combinators in the Fetch companion object.

Fetch provides its own instance of Applicative[Fetch]. Whenever we use applicative operations on more than one Fetch, we know that the fetches are independent meaning we can perform optimizations such as batching and concurrent requests.

If we were to use the default Applicative[Fetch] operations, which are implemented in terms of flatMap, we wouldn't have information about the independency of multiple fetches.

Applicative

The |@| operator (cartesian builder) allows us to combine multiple independent fetches, even when they are from different types, and apply a pure function to their results. We can use it as a more powerful alternative to the product method or Fetch#join:

Notice how the queries to posts are batched.

import cats.syntax.cartesian._

val fetchThree: Fetch[(Post, User, Post)] = (getPost(1) |@| getUser(2) |@| getPost(2)).tupled

fetchThree.runA[Id]
// res: (Post(1,2,An article),User(2,@two),Post(2,3,Another article))

More interestingly, we can use it to apply a pure function to the results of various fetches. 

val fetchFriends: Fetch[String] = (getUser(1) |@| getUser(2)).map((one, other) =>
  s"${one.username} is friends with ${other.username}")

fetchFriends.runA[Id] shouldBe res0

The above example is equivalent to the following using the Fetch#join method: 

val fetchLoves: Fetch[String] = Fetch
  .join(getUser(1), getUser(2))
  .map({
    case (one, other) =>
      s"${one.username} loves ${other.username}"
  })

fetchLoves.runA[Id] shouldBe res0