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)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to ReasonML, discusses the current state of web development and why we would consider ReasonML for frontend development (and more).

Chapter 2, Setting Up a Development Environment, gets us up and running.

Chapter 3, Creating ReasonReact Components, demonstrates how to create React components with ReasonML and ReasonReact. Here, we begin building an app shell that we add to throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 4, BuckleScript, Belt, and Interoperability, gives us a well-rounded understanding of Reason's ecosystem and standard library.

Chapter 5, Effective ML, dives into some more advanced features of Reason's type system using business examples.

Chapter 6, CSS-in-JS (in Reason), shows how CSS-in-JS works in Reason and how the type system can help.

Chapter 7, JSON in Reason, demonstrates how to convert JSON into data structures in Reason and illustrates how GraphQL can help.

Chapter 8, Unit Testing with Jest, jumps into testing with the popular Jest testing library.