Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Michele Bertoli
Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices

By: Michele Bertoli

Overview of this book

Taking a complete journey through the most valuable design patterns in React, this book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that’s for new or already existing projects. It will help you to make your applications more flexible, perform better, and easier to maintain – giving your workflow a huge boost when it comes to speed without reducing quality. We’ll begin by understanding the internals of React before gradually moving on to writing clean and maintainable code. We’ll build components that are reusable across the application, structure applications, and create forms that actually work. Then we’ll style React components and optimize them to make applications faster and more responsive. Finally, we’ll write tests effectively and you’ll learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of the book, you’ll be saved from a lot of trial and error and developmental headaches, and you will be on the road to becoming a React expert.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
React Design Patterns and Best Practices
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

A data fetching example


The example in the previous section should explain clearly how to set up a Universal application in React.

It is pretty straightforward, and the main focus is on getting things done with regard to its configuration.

However, in a real-world application, we will likely want to load some data instead of a static React component such as the App in the example. Suppose we want to load Dan Abramov's gists on the server and return the list of items from the Express app we just created.

In the data fetching examples in Chapter 5, Proper Data Fetching, we looked at how we can use componentDidMount to fire the data loading. That wouldn't work on the server because components do not get mounted on the DOM and the lifecycle hook never gets fired.

Using hooks that are executed earlier, such as componentWillMount, will not work either, because the data fetching operation is async while the renderToString is not. For that reason, we have to find a way to load the data beforehand and...