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

Summary


According to Facebook's Reconciliation documentation (https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/reconciliation.html)

"React's key design decision is to make the API seem like it re-renders the whole app on every update."

Thus, whenever the setState() method is called on an object, that particular node is marked. At the end of the event loop, all the nodes are re-rendered where the setState() method is called.

React is fast because it never talks to the DOM directly. It maintains an in-memory representation of the actual DOM. Whenever the render() method is called, it returns a mapping of the actual DOM. React can detect (using a diff algorithm) changes in the mapped DOM compared to the in-memory representation. It then re-renders the changes and updates the UI likewise.

The event ecosystem in React is implemented by a full synthetic event system (SyntheticEvent()). Cross-browser efficiency is achieved as all the events bubble up consistently.

In the current chapter, we have explored the stateful...