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)

Summary

Since Reason's reach is so broad, there are so many different ways to approach learning it. This book has focused on learning Reason from the perspective of a frontend developer. We've taken skills and concepts that we're already familiar with (such as building web applications with ReactJS) and explored how we would do the same with Reason. While on this journey, we learned about Reason's type system, its toolchain, and its ecosystem.

I believe the future of Reason is bright. Many of the skills we've learned are directly transferable to targeting a native platform. Reason's frontend story is currently more polished than its native story, but it's already possible to compile to both web and native. And it's only going to get better from here. There have already been huge improvements from when I first started using Reason, and I...