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

Flux versus the MVC architecture


In a typical application built on the MVC architecture, the views get updated from the data, which is typically stored in the models. As the application grows, the number of models and views also grow, and there grows the interdependency among the various models. Therefore the views also get tdependent on multiple models, thus increasing the complexity of the application.

The interdependence of views and models can create diffraction in the source of truth, leading to increased application complexity and unpredictability. As a result, there needs to be a solution to internalize the control by moving all the control into the individual pieces.

Issue with a growing app built with MVC

Flux advantages

According to the Facebook Flux development team, the objects within a Flux application are highly decoupled, and adhere very strongly to the first part of the Law of Demeter: the principle that each object within a system should know as little as possible about the...