Book Image

ReactJS by Example - Building Modern Web Applications with React

By : Vipul A M
Book Image

ReactJS by Example - Building Modern Web Applications with React

By: Vipul A M

Overview of this book

ReactJS is an open-source JavaScript library that brings the power of reactive programming to web applications and sites. It aims to address the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications, and is intended to help developers build large, easily scalable and changing web apps. Starting with a project on Open Library API, you will be introduced to React and JSX before moving on to learning about the life cycle of a React component. In the second project, building a multi-step wizard form, you will learn about composite dynamic components and perform DOM actions. You will also learn about building a fast search engine by exploring server-side rendering in the third project on a search engine application. Next, you will build a simple frontpage for an e-commerce app in the fourth project by using data models and React add-ons. In the final project you will develop a complete social media tracker by using the flux way of defining React apps and know about the best practices and use cases with the help of ES6 and redux. By the end of this book, you will not only have a good understanding of ReactJS but will also have built your very own responsive frontend applications from scratch.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
ReactJS by Example - Building Modern Web Applications with React
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Component life cycle overview


"Shawn, now let's start taking a look at how to dynamically fetch data from https://openlibrary.org/, store it in our component, and render it after making it compatible to render.

A component goes through different life cycle events. They help facilitate when we should initialize which part of a component or when should some external data be fetched.

We have already seen some of these methods such as render, getInitialState, and getDefaultProps.

An updated detailed list and example for the same can be found at http://videos.bigbinary.com/react/react-life-cycle-methods-in-depth.html.

Let's go through each of these, one by one, and how they can be used so that we can start fetching dynamic information for display. Here is a list of methods that we will discuss:

  • componentWillMount

  • componentDidMount

  • componentWillReceiveProps(object nextProps)

  • boolean shouldComponentUpdate(object nextProps, object nextState)

  • componentWillUpdate(object nextProps, object nextState...