Improving Performance in React Applications

Adrienne Gessler Design, JavaScript, Problem Solving, React 1 Comment

Let’s say you’ve stepped into a React application to make some updates or been involved in building one yourself. You have been at it a while, and feel somewhat comfortable using React, you understand React’s lifecycle and you may be using React libraries like Redux or MobX to some extent.

As with any technology, you start to notice that a few of the pages are looking a little slow. You know performance tuning too early is often a bad idea, but you feel like you might be at that point. After all, in your experience, end users notice even small lags and no one wants that. So what do you do now?

In this blog, I introduce six tips for improving performance and design in your React application.

Generate Strongly Typed React Components with GraphQL

Mat Warger AWS, GraphQL, JavaScript, Programming, Technology Snapshot Leave a Comment

When developing in React, using a type system (like Typescript or Flow) can be a great help. You can be sure that your props and state are what you expect, at build-time, and code your components to match.

But what happens when you’re calling to an API to fetch some data, and the shape of that data is what really matters? Maybe the data get passed as props to a child component? You can create types for this, sure, but are they correct? Probably not! Or at least, probably not for long! Things change. Wouldn’t it be great if your types changed too?

In this post, we’re going to take a simple component from zero type awareness to fully typed, with local variables and GraphQL queries included, with a simple workflow. Grab a cup of coffee and a snack, and let’s see how this we can use GraphQL to generate type-safe components in React.

Keyhole Announces Gold Dev Up 2018 Sponsorship & Speaker

Keyhole Software Community, Company News, GraphQL, Keyhole Leave a Comment

We are pleased to announce that Keyhole Software is a Gold Sponsor of the 2018 St. Louis Developer Conference! This will be the fourth year of Keyhole Sponsoring.

Formerly known as the St. Louis Days of .NET and rebranded as Dev Up during the 2015 conference, the 11th annual edition will bring together regional and national IT experts to share their knowledge for technology.

The Dev Up conference is October 8-10, 2018 at the St. Charles Convention Center in St. Charles, Missouri. Monday, October 8th features all-day hands-on sessions called “Pre-Compilers” which are optional. The main conference takes place on October 9th & 10th and features over 140 technical training sessions geared toward all levels of experience.

State Management with MobX and React

Nick Brown JavaScript, Problem Solving, React, Technology Snapshot Leave a Comment

There are many options when it comes to managing the state of a React application. Choosing the right one for your application can feel daunting.

The most popular choice, Redux, is often thought of as verbose because it requires a lot of boilerplate code, thus slowing down development. Redux is also very opinionated so it will take time for those unfamiliar with its functional programming paradigm to become comfortable with it.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at an alternative that aims to solve issues in React application state: MobX. To do that, I built a simple calorie counter application that will be used to showcase MobX in use.