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

React component lifecycle


As per Facebook's React documentation from http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/working-with-the-browser.html, the React component lifecycle can be broadly classified into three categories as follows:

"Mounting: A component is being inserted into the DOM.

Updating: A component is being re-rendered to determine if the DOM should be updated.

Unmounting: A component is being removed from the DOM."

React provides lifecycle methods that you can specify to hook into this process. We provide will methods, which are called right before something happens, and did methods which are called right after something happens.

Mounting category

Mounting is the process of publishing the virtual representation of a component into the final UI representation (for example, DOM or native components). In a browser, it would mean publishing a React element into an actual DOM element in the DOM tree.

Method Name

Method Function

getInitialState()

This method is invoked before the component is...