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)

Core concepts

In React, we are dealing with three core concepts, which we have already introduced the state, the action, and the reducer. Now, let's dive in deeper and really get a sense of how they fit together and how they work.

Immutability patterns

The whole point of the state is to take an existing state, apply an action to it, and produce a new state. It can be written like this:

old state + action = new state

Imagine, if you were performing basic calculations, then you would start writing it like this:

// sum is 0
let sum = 0;

// sum is now 3
sum +=3;

The Redux way of doing things, though, is to change the preceding to:

let sum = 0;
let sumWith3 = sum + 3;
let sumWith6 = sumWith3 + 3;

We don't mutate anything...