State Management with MobX and React

Nick Brown Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React 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.

One Router to Rule Them All: React Router

Mat Warger Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React Leave a Comment

Previously, we looked at a very basic example of how one can benefit greatly by using community projects such as Formik to avoid the tedium of certain solutions while embracing convention to create composable and scalable applications. We will be build on that foundation to explore the objectively great library that is React Router.

React Router has been at the forefront of routing in the React ecosystem for as long as I can remember. If you’re new to React, this is the way to go when you move state and start needing more options such as parameterized routing, nesting, and conditional rendering. If you have experience with React, this brings a powerful pattern to bear in that everything is a component. It takes the composablity of React and uses that to its benefit, handling any and all use-cases with relative ease.

In this blog, we’ll introduce the basics of the React Router through hands-on examples using its features.

My Reaction To React

David Pitt Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React, Tutorial 3 Comments

We at Keyhole have been helping our clients adopt JavaScript-based single-page applications for over five years. We have been impressed with the adoption and advancement of the ever-changing JavaScript ecosystem.

Server side, headless JavaScript (Node.js) has led to good tooling and packaging options along with server side remaining available. Additionally, the new ECMA6 standard has turned JavaScript into a viable general purpose programming language, that is arguably, on the same plane as C# or Java. It certainly has a large number of available frameworks and tooling options.

React differs from the other frameworks I’ve worked with in a handful of ways. In this blog, I will show tangible examples of React’s unique features and capabilities, particularly how it handles HTML-based Components.

Getting Started with Expo

Stewart Snyder Articles, JavaScript, Mobile, React, React Native, Tutorial 1 Comment

Expo is a platform and framework that allows you to write cross-platform code using React Native, taking advantage of the APIs native to each platform. This makes it extremely simple to develop and deploy apps to a variety of platforms. Additionally, it allows the apps to make use of the native components of whatever platform they are deployed to.

This post first reviews the different features of Expo and how they can be used to rapidly develop and deploy software. Then, we’ll talk through the steps you’ll need to take to get up and running with the tool.