React Native 0.18 Released, Let’s Compose Some React Containers, and Angular 2 vs React
Finding resources now is much easier than it was when we started the newsletter over a year ago. Tons of great content and really smart people building amazing tools and projects. We hope you're all doing well and your new year's resolutions are still in tact. If you like any of the resources below, be sure to let the author know you appreciate them and their work.
React Native 0.18 was released. Features include using React from NPM, Cross Platform Pull to Refresh, + much more.
There's a lot of discussion in the React world on whether using ES2015 classes is the right thing to do, or if sticking with createClass syntax is the way to go. James K Nelson weighs in with some in depth discussion on the issue.
In 2015 React was the darling of the web world. Will 2016 be the year Angular takes back its crown? In this article, Cory discusses the pros and cons and React and Angular2. td;dr "Angular 2 remains HTML-centric rather than JavaScript-centric."
There's a reason the web is moving towards modular components over monolithic apps. In this piece, Addy Osmani walks through what actually makes a component "Modular" as well as best practices in building web apps. He's coined the acronym FIRST which stands for Focused, Independent, Reusable, Small & Testable.
A few months ago Angular Class sent out a survey with questions regarding how developers use the React ecosystem. What's the percentage of devs using Redux vs Flux. Has Immutable taken over yet? What about CSS Modules? Find out the answers to those questions and more in the survey results.
Let's face it, it's not React that's difficult to learn - it's all the tools that go with React that's difficult to piece together. In this article, David offers some advice. Since all the tools are hard to piece together when you're first starting out, just... don't use them until you're ready. David describes a way that he's used an Emitter to organize his app without having to bring in the extra complexity that comes with tools like Redux as well as a nice overview of why React is great for building UI.
ƒ(d)=V. A function that receives data as its input and returns a view is called a Pure View. Elm, Ember 2, Om Next, and ReactJS all leverage pure views. If you've never understood the enormous benefit that pure views provide (HMR, Time travel Debugging, etc), this is the article for you.
Since it's inception, Flux has experienced a lot of variety, from simple libraries to mask boilerplate, to large scale changes to it's underlying patters. Dave Zukowski walks us through the process of how Redux was born out of Flux.
It's no secret that Angular 2 learned a lot from React. In this article, Scott Moss walks through Angular 2 from a React perspective. Regardless of if you ever plan on using NG2, learning the fundamentals will be worth your time.
Dave Zukowski has put a lot of time into his starter kit and now has one of the cleanest React / Redux starter kits out there. Give it a look.
Besides having a great name, Redux Chaos Monkey by Merrick is a proof of concept which allows you to replay system events in a random order each time to make sure your UI can tolerate variable states.
A quick way to prototype apps with React and Babel with zero-setup. Setting up the tooling required to work on a modern day web app is hard, and makes quick prototyping much more difficult than it should be. Quik is a quick way to prototype a React application without any kind of setup. Quik runs a simple server that compiles JavaScript files with Babel on the fly, so you can include ES2015 files in a script tag directly. It can also generate a JavaScript bundle to use in your app. No setup required.
Snowflake is a React-Native starter mobile app for iOS and Android with a single code base. Using Redux and Immutable, the state of the application is fully testable with Jest, currently at 86% coverage. Snowflake supports Hot Reloading of its state. Snowflake uses CI with Bitrise.io and has extensive docs and 45+ min of video demonstrating implementation.
At the November 2015 ViennaJS meetup, Nik Graf gave an introduction to building apps and React and Redux.