The action creator functions we've looked at so far in this chapter have been relatively simple—they dispatch some action when called. But before that happens, these action creators will typically reach out to some API endpoint to retrieve some data, then dispatch the action, using the data as the payload. These are called stateless action creator functions because there's no intermediary state about them—no lifecycle in other words.
In this section, we'll think about things that are stateful and how we might go about integrating these into our Flux architecture. Another challenge we could face is integrating our Flux application into another architecture. First, we'll cover some basic ground on stateful action creators, then we'll look at a concrete example using web sockets.