react

I admit I'm quite intrigued by frameworks that allow you write apps in web frameworks because they do magic to make them into native apps for you. There are loads of players here. You've got NativeScript, Cordova, PhoneGap, Tabris, React Native, and Flutter. For deskop apps, we've got Electron.

What's interesting now is to see what's important to these frameworks by honing in on their focus. Hummingbird is Flutter for the web. (There is a fun series on Flutter over on the Bendworks blog in addition to a post we published earlier this year.) The idea being you get super high performance ,thanks to the framework, and you've theoretically built one app that runs both on the web and natively. I don't know of any real success stories I can point to, but it does seem like an awesome possibility.

Nicolas Gallagher has been a strong proponent of React Native for the web.

Working with data in React is relatively easy because React is designed to handle data as state. The hassle begins when the amount of data you need to consume becomes massive. For example, say you have to handle a dataset which is between 500-1,000 records. This can result in massive loads and lead performance problems. Well, we’re going to look at how we can make use of virtualized lists in React to seamlessly render a long list of data in your application.

(more…)

In this article, we’re going to dig into the concept of CSS-in-JS. If you’re already acquainted with this concept, you might still enjoy a stroll through the philosophy of that approach, and you might be even more interested in the next article.

Web development is very interdisciplinary. We’re used to working closely with multiple languages. And, as developing web applications becomes more commonplace and nuanced, we often look for creative ways to bridge the gaps between those languages to make our development environments and workflows easier and more efficient.

(more…)

An Overview of Render Props in React

Using render props in React is a technique for efficiently re-using code. According to the React documentation, "a component with a render prop takes a function that returns a React element and calls it instead of implementing its own render logic." To understand what that means, let’s take a look at the render props pattern and then apply it to a couple of light examples.

(more…)

I had to build a UI recently and (for the first time in a long while) I didn't have the option of using React.js, which is my preferred solution for UI these days. So, I looked at what the built-in browser APIs had to offer and saw that using custom elements (aka Web Components) may just be the remedy that this React developer needed.

Custom elements can offer the same general benefits of React components without being tied to a specific framework implementation. A custom element gives us a new HTML tag that we can programmatically control through a native browser API.

(more…)

One of the advantages of building a Single Page Application (SPA) is the way navigating between pages is extremely fast. Unfortunately, the data of our components is sometimes only available after we have navigated to a specific part of our application. We can level up the user’s perceived performance by breaking the component into two pieces: the container (which displays a skeleton view when it’s empty) and the content. If we delay the rendering of the content component until we have actually received the content required, then we can leverage the skeleton view of the container thus boosting the perceived load time!

Let’s get started in creating our components.

(more…)

Sharing functionality between React components is a pretty common need. The concept is that we can establish the behavior in one place and then extend it across different components. Higher-Order Components are one way to do this. Yet, there is another way using a library called Recompose.

(more…)

Most of the behavior in an application revolves around events. User enters a value in the registration form? Event. User hits the submit button? Another event. Events are triggered a number of ways and we build applications to listen for them in order to do something else in response.

You may already be super comfortable working with events based on your existing JavaScript experience. However, React has a distinct way of handling them. Rather than directly targeting DOM events, React wraps them in their own event wrapper. But we’ll get into that.

Let’s go over how to create, add and listen for events in React.

(more…)