Book Image

React 16 Tooling

By : Adam Boduch, Christopher Pitt
Book Image

React 16 Tooling

By: Adam Boduch, Christopher Pitt

Overview of this book

React 16 Tooling covers the most important tools, utilities, and libraries that every React developer needs to know — in detail. As React has grown, the amazing toolset around it has also grown, adding features and enhancing the development workflow. Each of these essential tools is presented in a practical manner and in a logical order mirroring the development workflow. These tools will make your development life simpler and happier, enabling you to create better and more performant apps. Adam starts with a hand-picked selection of the best tools for the React 16 ecosystem. For starters, there’s the create-react-app utility that’s officially supported by the React team. Not only does this tool bootstrap your React project for you, it also provides a consistent and stable framework to build upon. The premise is that when you don’t have to think about meta development work, more focus goes into the product itself. Other React tools follow this same approach to automating and improving your development life. Jest makes unit testing quicker. Flow makes catching errors easier. Docker containers make deployment in a stack simpler. Storybook makes developing components straightforward. ESLint makes writing standardized code faster. The React DevTools plugin makes debugging a cinch. React 16 Tooling clears away the barriers so you can focus on developing the good parts. In this book, we’ll look at each of these powerful tools in detail, showing you how to build the perfect React ecosystem to develop your apps within.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
2
Efficiently Bootstrapping React Applications with Create React App
Index

Validating component properties and state


React was designed with Flow static type-checking in mind. The most common use of Flow in React applications is to validate that component properties and state are being used correctly. You can also enforce the types of components that are allowed as children of another component.

Prior to Flow, React would rely on the prop-types mechanism to validate values passed to components. This is now a separate package from React and you can still use it today. Flow is a superior choice over prop-types because it performs checks statically whereas prop-types performs runtime validation. This means that your application doesn't need to run superfluous code during runtime.

Primitive property values

The most common types of values that are passed to components via props are primitive values—strings, numbers, and Booleans for example. Using Flow, you can declare your own type that says which primitive values are allowed for a given property.

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