Book Image

Architecting Angular Applications with Redux, RxJS, and NgRx

Book Image

Architecting Angular Applications with Redux, RxJS, and NgRx

Overview of this book

Managing the state of large-scale web applications is a highly challenging task with the need to align different components, backends, and web workers harmoniously. When it comes to Angular, you can use NgRx, which combines the simplicity of Redux with the reactive programming power of RxJS to build your application architecture, making your code elegant and easy to reason about, debug, and test. In this book, we start by looking at the different ways of architecting Angular applications and some of the patterns that are involved in it. This will be followed by a discussion on one-way data flow, the Flux pattern, and the origin of Redux. The book introduces you to declarative programming or, more precisely, functional programming and talks about its advantages. We then move on to the reactive programming paradigm. Reactive programming is a concept heavily used in Angular and is at the core of NgRx. Later, we look at RxJS, as a library and master it. We thoroughly describe how Redux works and how to implement it from scratch. The two last chapters of the book cover everything NgRx has to offer in terms of core functionality and supporting libraries, including how to build a micro implementation of NgRx. This book will empower you to not only use Redux and NgRx to the fullest, but also feel confident in building your own version, should you need it.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

We started this chapter by trying to explain how important it was to get a good foundation in application architecture in general, and for that reason we had a look at the MVC pattern. We then continued describing how the MVC pattern was somewhat used in Angular, even though it was called MVW, model view whatever. We did this to understand that the Angular framework consists of a lot of constructs that help us organize our application in a way that makes it easy to extend, maintain, and parallelize the work.

Angular brought a lot of new things to it though, such as ES2015 modules, which attempted to solve the problem of how to split up the code in a manageable way. After that, we argued that although ES2015 modules were great, there was a lot of ceremony attached to them when it came to creating complex objects. To help relieve us of that ceremony, we described how Angular Dependency Injection could be the solution to said problem. In reality, you will use ES2015 to import your constructs. What Angular DI helps us with is creating the dependencies needed for our constructs.

Lastly, we tied the knot of explaining the MVC pattern by simply stating that data doesn't really live permanently, in either the model, the controller, or the view, but can be retrieved and persisted by talking to an endpoint, reachable through HTTP. We concluded the chapter by describing how the Angular 4.x HTTP service can help us with just that.

All of this is interesting from an educational standpoint. It doesn't describe the elephant in the room, how do we manage our data when things gets complicated? The concerns we have to deal with are:

  • Bidirectional data flow
  • Lack of predictability (a change can lead to cascading changes)
  • Spread out state (there is no one source of truth and our components can sit on a state that is partially updated)

Let's keep these concerns in mind as we move on to Chapter 2, 1.21 Gigawatt – The Flux Pattern Explained.