Book Image

Vuex Quick Start Guide

By : Andrea Koutifaris
Book Image

Vuex Quick Start Guide

By: Andrea Koutifaris

Overview of this book

State management preserves the state of controls in a user interface. Vuex is a state management tool for Vue.js that makes the architecture easier to understand, maintain and evolve. This book is the easiest way to get started with Vuex to improve your Vue.js application architecture and overall user experience. Our book begins by explaining the problem that Vuex solves, and how it helps your applications. You will learn about the Vuex core concepts, including the Vuex store, changing application state, carrying out asynchronous operations and persisting state changes, all with an eye to scalability. You will learn how to test Vuex elements and Vue components with the Karma and Jasmine testing frameworks. You will see this in the context of a testing first approach, following the fundamentals of Test Driven Development. TDD will help you to identify which components need testing and how to test them. You will build a full Vuex application by creating the application components and services, and persist the state. Vuex comes with a plugin system that allows programmers to extend Vuex features. You will learn about some of the most powerful plugins, and make use of the built-in logger plugin. You write a custom Google Analytics plugin to send actions to its analytics API, and an Undo/Redo plugin.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Rethinking User Interfaces with Flux, Vue, and Vuex

I started my first job as a Java EE programmer at the end of 2007. I still remember my friend Giuseppe saying, You don't like JavaScript, do you? and me answering, No, I don't. Each time I write something in JavaScript, it doesn't work in all versions of Internet Explorer... not to mention Firefox! He just replied, Have a look at jQuery. Today, I like to call myself a JavaScript programmer.

Since then, web development has evolved a lot. A number of JavaScript frameworks became popular and then declined because new frameworks emerged. You may think that it is not worth learning new frameworks since they will eventually decline in popularity. Well, in my opinion, that is not true. Each framework added something useful to web development, something that we still use. For example, jQuery made use of JavaScript that was so simple that we started moving client logic to the browser instead of rendering everything server-side.

Today, we write progressive web applications that are complex applications with web user interfaces. This complexity requires discipline and best practices. Fortunately, big companies such as Facebook, Google, and others have introduced frameworks and guidelines to help web programmers. You may have heard about Google's Material Design or Facebook's Flux.

In this chapter we will focus on the following:

  • Model-view-controller (MVC) problems, and using Facebook Flux architecture to solve these problems
  • Flux fundamentals
  • What Vuex is
  • Architectural differences between Flux and Vuex

To understand this book, you need a good knowledge of Vue.js and JavaScript, a basic understanding of ECMAScript 6, and a very basic knowledge of webpack. In any case, almost all the concepts used here, Vuex and otherwise, are explained.

After explaining the Flux concepts, this book will help you understand how Vuex implements these concepts, how to use Vue.js and Vuex to build professional web applications, and finally how to extend Vuex functionality.