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.

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Small book image
Getting Started with React
Doel Sengupta | Manu Singhal | Danillo Corvalan
Apr, 2016 | 212 pages
No titles found
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting Started with React
Getting Started with React
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with ReactJS
Getting Started with ReactJS
Introducing ReactJS
Downloading ReactJS
Tools
Trying ReactJS
Summary
2
Exploring JSX and the ReactJS Anatomy
Exploring JSX and the ReactJS Anatomy
What is JSX?
Why JSX?
The ReactJS anatomy
Learning JSX and Gotchas
Summary
3
Working with Properties
Working with Properties
Component properties
Configuring Facebook Open-Graph API
Rendering data in a ReactJS component
Summary
4
Stateful Components and Events
Stateful Components and Events
Properties versus states in ReactJS
Exploring the state property
Events
Summary
5
Component Life cycle and Newer ECMAScript in React
Component Life cycle and Newer ECMAScript in React
React component lifecycle
Other ES (ECMAScript) versions in React
Summary
6
Reacting with Flux
Reacting with Flux
An overview of Flux
Flux versus the MVC architecture
Actions
Dispatchers
Stores
Controller-Views and Views
Revisiting the code
Summary
7
Making Your Component Reusable
Making Your Component Reusable
Understanding Mixins
Validations
The structure of component
Summary
8
Testing React Components
Testing React Components
Testing in JavaScript using Chai and Mocha
Testing using ReactTestUtils
The jestTypical example of a Testsuite with Mocha, expect, ReactTestUtils and Babel
Testing with shallow rendering
Summary
9
Preparing Your Code for Deployment
Preparing Your Code for Deployment
An introduction to Webpack
Advantages of Webpack
Introduction to Gulp
Summary
10
What's Next
What's Next
AJAX in React
React Router
Server-side rendering
Isomorphic applications
Hot reloading
Redux React
Relay and GraphQL
React Native
References
Summary
Index
Index

Testing using ReactTestUtils

ReactTestUtils is used to test React-based components. It can simulate all the JavaScript-based events, which ReactJS supports. The documentation is cited in the Facebook developer site (https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/test-utils.html).

The code is as shown for the stimulate function:

Simulate.{eventName}(
  DOMElement element,
  [object eventData]
)

Installing React and JSX

As mentioned earlier, while installing the Chai and mocha, we are here installing React- and JSX-specific test tools (ReactTestUtils) in order to ease our task. Let's explore the ReactTestUtils with help from some React-based components and stimulate them to test the behavior and functionality.

The following is an example of such a code.

We need to install the jest package via npm with the following code in the terminal:

sudo npm install jest-cli –save-dev

sudo/root access to the machine/server where the node packages has to be installed is required. This is particularly required as the directory...

Previous Section
End of Section 3
Next Section