Book Image

ReasonML Quick Start Guide

By : Raphael Rafatpanah, Bruno Joseph D'mello
Book Image

ReasonML Quick Start Guide

By: Raphael Rafatpanah, Bruno Joseph D'mello

Overview of this book

ReasonML, also known as Reason, is a new syntax and toolchain for OCaml that was created by Facebook and is meant to be approachable for web developers. Although OCaml has several resources, most of them are from the perspective of systems development. This book, alternatively, explores Reason from the perspective of web development. You'll learn how to use Reason to build safer, simpler React applications and why you would want to do so. Reason supports immutability by default, which works quite well in the context of React. In learning Reason, you will also learn about its ecosystem – BuckleScript, JavaScript interoperability, and various npm workflows. We learn by building a real-world app shell, including a client-side router with page transitions, that we can customize for any Reason project. You'll learn how to leverage OCaml's excellent type system to enforce guarantees about business logic, as well as preventing runtime type errors.You'll also see how the type system can help offload concerns that we once had to keep in our heads. We'll explore using CSS-in-Reason, how to use external JSON in Reason, and how to unit-test critical business logic. By the end of the book, you'll understand why Reason is exploding in popularity and will have a solid foundation on which to continue your journey with Reason.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Binding to existing ReactJS components

ReactJS components are not Reason components. To use an existing ReactJS component, we use [@bs.module] to import the node module, and then use the ReasonReact.wrapJsForReason helper function to convert the ReactJS component to a Reason component. There is also a ReasonReact.wrapReasonForJs helper function for using Reason in ReactJS.

Let's resume building our app from where we left off in Chapter 3, Creating ReasonReact Components:

git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/ReasonML-Quick-Start-Guide.git
cd ReasonML-Quick-Start-Guide
cd Chapter03/app-end
npm install

Here, we'll add route transitions by binding to the existing React Transition Group components:

React Transition Group documentation can be found here:

https://reactcommunity.org/react-transition-group/
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