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

Comparison of XMLHttpRequest, the Fetch API, and Axios

In the previous sections, we have learned how to fetch data from a server in several ways, XMLHttpRequest, the Fetch API, and Axios. In this section, we are going to compare the differences between the three main methods based on the following factors:

  • Ease of syntax
  • Supporting promises
  • Browser support

We will discuss which method we want to use:

  • Ease of syntax: When we compare the syntax in the previous section, the Fetch API and Axios provide much easier syntax than XMLHttpRequest. The syntax of Fetch and Axios is cleaner and simpler to understand and also ensures fewer lines of boilerplate code.
  • Supporting promises: The Fetch API and Axios provide promises. We are going to talk about promises in more depth in Chapter 15, Promise API and async/await, but briefly, they allow you to chain functions, which helps us avoid callback hell.

    Callback hell is an anti-pattern that consists of...