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 event handler functions


React components use functions to respond to events. These are called event handler functions, and they're passed an event object as an argument when the React event system calls them. It can be useful to use Flow to explicitly type these event arguments to make sure that your event handler is getting the type of element that it expects.

For example, assume that you're working on a component that responds to clicks from an <a> element. Your event handler function also needs to interact with the clicked element, in order to get the href property. Using the Flow types exposed by React, you can ensure that the correct element type is indeed triggering the event that is causing your function to run:

// @flow
import * as React from 'react';
import { Component } from 'react';

class EventHandler extends Component<{}> {
  clickHandler = (e: SyntheticEvent<HTMLAnchorElement>): void => {
    e.preventDefault();
    console.log('clicked', e.currentTarget...