We have achieved some pretty big wins for our development process. There’s one more convenience I want to add before we move deeper into Webpack configuration.
Imagine an application that consists of a form that pops up in a modal when a user clicks on an Edit button. When you reload the page, that modal is closed. Now, imagine that you’re the developer trying to fine-tune that form. Your Dev server is reloading the page after every tweak, forcing you to reopen the modal. This is mildly annoying in this case, but think about something like a browser game, where getting back to where you were requires several clicks.
In short, we need a way to reload our JavaScript while still preserving the current state of the application, without reloading the page itself; this is called hot reloading. We use Webpack to swap out the bits of our UI that have changed, without reloading everything.
In order to do so, we will use Dan Abramov’sreact-hot-loader package. Let’s install it and see how...