Book Image

Getting Started with React

By : Doel Sengupta, Manu Singhal, Danillo Corvalan
Book Image

Getting Started with React

By: Doel Sengupta, Manu Singhal, Danillo Corvalan

Overview of this book

ReactJS, popularly known as the V (view) of the MVC architecture, was developed by the Facebook and Instagram developers. It follows a unidirectional data flow, virtual DOM, and DOM difference that are generously leveraged in order to increase the performance of the UI. Getting Started with React will help you implement the Reactive paradigm to build stateless and asynchronous apps with React. We will begin with an overview of ReactJS and its evolution over the years, followed by building a simple React component. We will then build the same react component with JSX syntax to demystify its usage. You will see how to configure the Facebook Graph API, get your likes list, and render it using React. Following this, we will break the UI into components and you’ll learn how to establish communication between them and respond to users input/events in order to have the UI reflect their state. You’ll also get to grips with the ES6 syntaxes. Moving ahead, we will delve into the FLUX and its architecture, which is used to build client-side web applications and complements React’s composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. Towards the end, you’ll find out how to make your components reusable, and test and deploy them into a production environment. Finally, we’ll briefly touch on other topics such as React on the server side, Redux and some advanced concepts.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting Started with React
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Rendering data in a ReactJS component


We now have our data to pass to the ReactJS component we're going to create. First, let's start with the UserDetails component. This is going to show a link with the logged-in username and the source to this user Facebook page. First, remove our old logout anchor from the index.html file as this is not going to be necessary anymore. Our logout functionality will be moved to our ReactJS component instead. We'll also create another div, named user, above the main div; this new element will hold the UserDetails component. The changes in index.html should look like this:

<h1>Facebook User's list of likes</h1>
<div id="user"></div>
<div id="main"></div>

You can create the UserDetails ReactJS component at the bottom of the index.jsx file:

var UserDetails = React.createClass({
    handleLogout: function () {
    FB.logout(function () {
      alert("You're logged out, refresh the page in order to login again.");
    });
  }
...