Book Image

The React Workshop

By : Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot
5 (1)
Book Image

The React Workshop

5 (1)
By: Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot

Overview of this book

Are you interested in how React takes command of the view layer for web and mobile apps and changes the data of large web applications without needing to reload the page? This workshop will help you learn how and show you how to develop and enhance web apps using the features of the React framework with interesting examples and exercises. The workshop starts by demonstrating how to create your first React project. You’ll tap into React’s popular feature JSX to develop templates and use DOM events to make your project interactive. Next, you’ll focus on the lifecycle of the React component and understand how components are created, mounted, unmounted, and destroyed. Later, you’ll create and customize components to understand the data flow in React and how props and state communicate between components. You’ll also use Formik to create forms in React to explore the concept of controlled and uncontrolled components and even play with React Router to navigate between React components. The chapters that follow will help you build an interesting image-search app to fetch data from the outside world and populate the data to the React app. Finally, you’ll understand what ref API is and how it is used to manipulate DOM in an imperative way. By the end of this React book, you’ll have the skills you need to set up and create web apps using React.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Preface

Different Ways of Requesting Data

In most applications, it is very common to request data from a server and display it on a web page dynamically. In modern web applications, clients such as browsers request data from a server and only load content partially on the page. That prevents reloading the entire page to display the new data or content and provide a better user experience. For example, Tumblr is a social networking website with a huge database running in the backend. However, when we fetch data, there isn't a lot of loading time involved. The reason for this is the partial loading of the content. As the user scrolls down a Tumblr page, the content is loaded dynamically. Let's look at the following diagram:

Figure 14.6: Requesting data for partial update on the browser

We can see in the previous diagram that only partial data is being loaded onto the web page. The different methods used to fetch data from a server are:

  • XMLHttpRequest...