react

Let's take a look at Hoodie, the "Back-End as a Service" (BaaS) built specifically for front-end developers. I want to explain why I feel like it is a well-designed tool and deserves more exposure among the spectrum of competitors than it gets today. I've put together a demo that demonstrates some of the key features of the service, but I feel the need to first set the scene for its use case. Feel free to jump over to the demo repo if you want to get the code. Otherwise, join me for a brief overview.

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Today we'll be adding authentication (via Google Authentication and Firebase) to our Fun Food Friends app, so that only users that are signed in can view who is bringing what to the potluck, as well as be able to contribute their own items. When users are not signed in, they will be unable to see what people are bringing to the potluck, nor will they be able to add their own items.

In Part 1, I went over various functional-style techniques for cleanly rendering HTML given some JavaScript data. We broke our UI up into component functions, each of which returned a chunk of markup as a function of some data. We then composed these into views that could be reconstructed from new data by making a single function call.

This is the bonus round. In this post, the aim will be to get as close as possible to full-blown, class-based React Component syntax, with VanillaJS (i.e. using native JavaScript with no libraries/frameworks). I want to make a disclaimer that some of the techniques here are not super practical, but I think they'll still make a fun and interesting exploration of how far JavaScript has come in recent years, and what exactly React does for us.

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Let's take a look at building something using Firebase and React. We'll be building something called Fun Food Friends, a web application for planning your next potluck, which hopefully feels like something rather "real world", in that you can imagine using these technologies in your own production projects. The big idea in this app is that you and your friends will be able to log in and be able to see and post information about what you're planning to bring to the potlock.

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React provides two standard ways to grab values from <form></form> elements. The first method is to implement what are called controlled components (see my blog post on the topic) and the second is to use React's ref property.

Controlled components are heavy duty. The defining characteristic of a controlled component is the displayed value is bound to component state. To update the value, you execute a function attached to the onChange event handler on the form element. The onChange function updates the state property, which in turn updates the form element's value.

(Before we get too far, if you just want to see the code samples for this article: here you go!)

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When does a project need React? That's the question Chris Coyier addressed in a recent blog post. I'm a big fan of Chris' writing, so I was curious to see what he had to say.

In a nutshell, Chris puts forward a series of good and bad reasons why one might want to use React (or other similar modern JavaScript libraries) on a project. Yet while I don't disagree with his arguments, I still find myself coming to a different conclusion.

So today, I'm here to argue that the answer to "When does a project need React?" is not "it depends". It's "every time".

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You know when a project needs HTML and CSS, because it's all of them. When you reach for JavaScript is fairly clear: when you need interactivity or some functionality that only JavaScript can provide. It used to be fairly clear when we reached for libraries. We reached for jQuery to help us simplify working with the DOM, Ajax, and handle cross-browser issues with JavaScript. We reached for underscore to give us helper functions that the JavaScript alone didn't have.

As the need for these libraries fades, and we see a massive rise in new frameworks, I'd argue it's not as clear when to reach for them. At what point do we need React?

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