Articles Tagged react

A React component goes through different phases as it lives in an application, though it might not be evident that anything is happening behind the scenes.

Those phases are:

• mounting
• updating
• unmounting
• error handling

There are methods in each of these phases that make it possible to perform specific actions on the component during that phase. For example, when fetching data from a network, you’d want to call the function that handles the API call in the componentDidMount() method, which … Read article

I've said before one quick and powerful thing you can learn as a front-end developer just getting starting with JavaScript is changing classes.… Read article

Over the course of the last four articles in this five-part series, we’ve taken a broad look at the technologies that make up the Web Components standards. First, we looked at how to create HTML templates that could be consumed at a later time. Second, we dove into creating our own custom element. After that, we encapsulated our element’s styles and selectors into the shadow DOM, so that our element is entirely self-contained.

We’ve explored how powerful these … Read article

Leslie Cohn-Wein's main point:

While [lots of divs, inline styles, focus management problems] are valid concerns, it should be noted that nothing in React prevents us from building accessible web apps.

True. I'm quite capable (and sadly, guilty) of building inaccessible interfaces with React or without.

I've long told people that one way to level up your front-end design and development skills, especially in your early days, is to understand how to change classes. I can write a few … Read article

In a bid to have web applications serve needs for different types of users, it’s likely that more code is required than it would be for one type of user so the app can handle and adapt to different scenarios and use cases, which lead to new features and functionalities. When this happens, it’s reasonable to expect the performance of an app to dwindle as the codebase grows.

Code splitting is a technique where an application only loads the code … Read article

While it is important to have a well-tested API, solid test coverage is a must for any React application. Tests increase confidence in the code and helps prevent shipping bugs to users.

That’s why we’re going to focus on testing in this post, specifically for React applications. By the end, you’ll be up and running with tests using Jest and Enzyme.… Read article

One way to deal with long, complex forms is to break them up into multiple steps. You know, answer one set of questions, move on to another, then maybe another, and so on and so forth. We often refer to these as multi-step forms (for obvious reasons), but others also take to calling it a “wizard” form.

Multi-step forms can be a great idea! By only showing a few inputs on a screen at a time, the form may feel … Read article

Not to be confused with Lifecycle Hooks, Hooks were introduced in React in v16.7.0-alpha, and a proof of concept was released for Vue a few days after. Even though it was proposed by React, it’s actually an important composition mechanism that has benefits across JavaScript framework ecosystems, so we’ll spend a little time today discussing what this means.

Mainly, Hooks offer a more explicit way to think of reusable patterns — one that avoids rewrites to the components themselves … Read article

Most web applications built today receive data from an API. When fetching that data, we have to take certain situations into consideration where the data might not have been received. Perhaps it was a lost connection. Maybe it was the endpoint was changed. Who knows. Whatever the issue, it's the end user who winds up with a big bag of nothing on the front end.

So we ought to account for that!… Read article

Hooks make it possible to organize logic in components, making them tiny and reusable without writing a class. In a sense, they’re React’s way of leaning into functions because, before them, we’d have to write them in a component and, while components have proven to be powerful and functional in and of themselves, they have to render something on the front end. That’s all fine and dandy to some extent, but the result is a DOM that is littered with divs that make it gnarly to dig through through DevTools and debug.