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

Profiling component performance


Profiling the performance of your React components is made easier by React Developer Tools. It makes it easier to spot updates that cause elements to re-render when no re-render is actually necessary. It also makes it easier to collect the amount of CPU time that a given component spends, and where it spends it during its lifespan.

Although React Developer Tools does not include any memory profile tooling, we'll look at how you can use the existing memory developer tool to specifically profile for React elements.

Removing reconciliation work

Reconciliation is what happens when a React element is rendered. It first computes the virtual DOM tree that will render the element's current state and props. Then, this tree is compared to the existing tree for the element, assuming it has been rendered at least once already. The reason that React does this is because reconciling changes like this in JavaScript, before interacting with the DOM, is more performant. DOM interactions...