Book Image

ReasonML Quick Start Guide

By : Raphael Rafatpanah, Bruno Joseph D'mello
Book Image

ReasonML Quick Start Guide

By: Raphael Rafatpanah, Bruno Joseph D'mello

Overview of this book

ReasonML, also known as Reason, is a new syntax and toolchain for OCaml that was created by Facebook and is meant to be approachable for web developers. Although OCaml has several resources, most of them are from the perspective of systems development. This book, alternatively, explores Reason from the perspective of web development. You'll learn how to use Reason to build safer, simpler React applications and why you would want to do so. Reason supports immutability by default, which works quite well in the context of React. In learning Reason, you will also learn about its ecosystem – BuckleScript, JavaScript interoperability, and various npm workflows. We learn by building a real-world app shell, including a client-side router with page transitions, that we can customize for any Reason project. You'll learn how to leverage OCaml's excellent type system to enforce guarantees about business logic, as well as preventing runtime type errors.You'll also see how the type system can help offload concerns that we once had to keep in our heads. We'll explore using CSS-in-Reason, how to use external JSON in Reason, and how to unit-test critical business logic. By the end of the book, you'll understand why Reason is exploding in popularity and will have a solid foundation on which to continue your journey with Reason.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Effective ML

So far, we've learned the basics of Reason. We've seen how having a sound type system can make refactoring a safer, less stressful endeavor. When changing an implementation detail, the type system helpfully alerts us to the other areas of the codebase that need to be updated. In this chapter, we'll learn how to hide implementation details to make refactoring even easier. By hiding implementation details, we guarantee that changing them won't affect other areas of your codebase.

We'll also learn how the type system can help us enforce business rules in our application. Hiding implementation details also gives us a nice way to enforce business rules by guaranteeing that modules are not being misused by the user. We'll illustrate this point throughout much of this chapter using simple code examples that are included in this book's GitHub...