Название: Developing A React.js Edge : The javascript Library For User Interfaces, 2nd Edition
Автор: Richard Feldman, Frankie Bagnardi, Simon Højberg
Издательство: Bleeding Edge Press
Год: 2018
Страниц: 238
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 10.17 MB

React is a javascript library developed internally at Facebook and open sourced in 2013 for building interactive user interfaces for the web. It introduces a new way to deal with the Browser’s DOM. Gone are the days of manually updating the DOM and laboriously keeping track of each piece of state that makes scalability and new feature development at best, a risky endeavor. Instead, React deals with the DOM in a very novel way. You declaratively define your user interface at any point in time. React removes the need to worry about which part of the DOM needs to update when data changes, and enables you to essentially re-render your entire application at any point in time with minimal DOM changes.

How this book helps
React introduces new and exciting concepts that challenge current practices. This book will enable you to navigate all of these concepts and help you understand why they are beneficial and can help you build scalable Single Page Applications (SPAs). React focuses mainly on the “view” part of an application, and thus does not prescribe server communication or code organization. In this book we will cover the current best practices and complementary tools to help you build a complete application with React.

Historically, many javascript libraries have prioritized performance or code organization - by making it easier to do high-performance DOM operations across browsers, or by offering organizational patterns that make code easier to scale. React has soared in popularity by making it easy to achieve both performance improvements and code scaling at the same time. This potent combination has made it one of the top ten most popular libraries across all of GitHub.

React started as a port of a PHP framework by Facebook called XHP. Being a PHP framework, XHP was designed to render your entire page every time a request was made. React was born to bring the PHP style work flow of re-rendering the entire page to client side applications. React is essentially a “state machine,” helping you manage the complexity of state changing over time. It achieves this by having a very narrow scope. It is concerned with only two things:

- Updating the DOM
- Responding to events

React has no opinions on AJAX, routing, storage, or how to structure your data. It is not a Model-View-Controller framework; if anything, it is the V in MVC. This narrow scope gives you the freedom to incorporate React into a wide variety of systems. In fact, it has been used to render views in several popular MVC frameworks. Rendering the entire page every time some state changes is incredibly slow in javascript due to the performance penalty of reading and updating the DOM. React has a very powerful rendering system that uses a virtual DOM, resulting in React only needing to update the DOM and not read from the DOM.

What do you need to know prior to reading the book?
To get the most out of this book you’ll need to be experienced with javascript and HTML. It’s beneficial if you have experience with writing SPAs (regardless of which framework like Backbone.js, AngularJS, or Ember.js), but it is not required.