Modern Front Stack with React JS

Things You Don’t Want to Miss about Modern Front Stack with React JS!

React JS is one of the preeminently used JavaScript libraries for developing front-end or Graphic User Interface (GUI) for web applications. It will be very helpful and important for full-stack Java developers. React JS, developed and supported by Facebook has fattened its demand and usage in recent years. It has become the de-facto library for component-based GUI development. Though there are other front-end frameworks and tools available in the market, React JS’s component-based GUI made them unique and different from them.

When a developer starts working with React JS, he should be familiar with build tools and package managers.

Some of the package managers used are:

npm

npm is one of the largest software registries. npm is used to share and borrow packages, and to manage private development too. 

Npm consists of 3 distinct components:

• The website

Discover packages, set up profiles, and manage other features of the npm experience. 

• Command-line interface (CLI)

CLI runs from a terminal, and it is how most developers react with npm.

• Registry

It is a large public database of JavaScript.

 

      Advantages of npm

• Download standalone tools anytime
• Share code with any npm user
• Manage and control different versions of the code
• Limit code access to specific developers
• Run packages without downloading using npx

yarn

Yarn is one of the package managers for your code. It helps to maintain and share the code with other developers within your team.

     Advantages of yarn

• Yarn helps to share the code with other developers very quickly, securely, and also reliably
• Developers can use the solution of other developers and make software development very easier

Task runners

Task runners add support for npm scripts defined in package.json directly in Visual studio’s task runner explorer.

 Advantages of task runners

• Automation of numerous development tasks
• Spinning up development servers
• Compiling code
• Bind any task to certain events that happen in the Visual studio like Build, Clean, and Project Open.

Gulp

Gulp is also an open-source tool used with Node and its package manager to install gulp plugins. It is used to automate repetitive tasks in web development. Gulp reads files as streams and connects the streams to different tasks.

 Advantages of gulp

• Spinning up a web browser
• Reloading a browser automatically when a file is saved

Webpack

Webpack is also called a module bundler because it helps you to compile JavaScript modules. It can perform many operations like bundling your resources and generating a single file that runs your application.

Advantages of Webpack

• Multi-process parallel running support
• Caching capability
• Improved build performance by 45%

 

Rollup

Rollup is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into larger applications or a library. It is mainly used for libraries.

Rollup has node polyfills for import/export functions. 

 

Parcel

Parcel is a zero-configuration build tool for Node, JavaScript, SASS, SVG, Vue, Coffeescript, and many other tools for web development.

Advantages of Parcel

• Includes development server out of the box
• Automatically updates your code in your browser
• 10-20x faster than other JavaScript-based tools
• Reliable caching

Styling and State Management 

Styling is one of the important parts while using React JS in web and app development. A front-end developer like React developer should be very familiar and learn CSS Frameworks, CSS Architecture, CSS in JS. Learning Bootstrap, one of the most critical CSS Frameworks, is nowadays very commonly used for React development. 

Like HTML and JavaScript, CSS is one of the core technologies used in web design and web development. CSS helps to do advanced styling with responsive design. The world’s best responsive websites are HTML5 and CSS3. The best CSS Frameworks used are Flexbox, Grid, and SAAS to design modern websites.

Redux is another javascript library for managing application state. It is used with other JavaScript libraries like Angular and React JS for developing modern front end applications. 

TypeCheckers

React has some built-in type checking capabilities, which will reduce accidental errors like storing integer variables into String or vice versa. This will make your code more stable and readable. TypeScript is one of the JavaScript extensions which use the power of String, integer, boolean, and other static types. TypeScript compiler generates JavaScript code that can be run on any browser.

API clients

APIs like REST and Graph QL will help to communicate with other applications while using React JS. Here are a few API clients available for React developers:

REST

• Fetch
• SuperAgent
• Axios

Graph QL

• Apollo
• Relay
• URL

Apollo provides an easy way to use Graph QL to build client applications. The client is created in such a way that it would help to build UI very quickly to fetch data with Graph QL and can be used with any JavaScript front end.

Utility Libraries

Utility libraries are available for React developers which will make the development easier and quicker. Some of the utility libraries used for React development are:

• Lodash
• Moment
• Class names
• Numeral
• RxJS
• Ramda

Testing

Testing is one of the important things for React developers which they should overlook on learning libraries to accomplish quality and stability during React testing. 

We have libraries for Unit testing, Integration testing, and E2E testing.

The list of libraries are:

Unit testing

• Jest
• Enzyme
• Sinon
• Mocha
• Chai
• AVA
• Tape

E2E testing

• Selenium
• Cypress
• Puppeteer
• Cucumber.js
• Nightwatch.js

Mobile

React Native is quickly becoming the most standard and common way to develop mobile applications in JavaScript. This will give the app a native look and feel. Using React Native, a single codebase can be shared across multiple platforms. 

React Native helps to create truly Native apps and doesn’t compromise on end users’ experience. It provides a core set of platform-agnostic native components like View, text, and Image that map directly to platforms’ native UI building blocks. React components interact with native APIs via React’s declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript. 

Conclusion

React development has reached and become the future of web app development with its versatility and ease of use. React saves time and money on your development because it’s component-based and can break any interface into reusable components. React also helps to build dynamic web applications with less effort and time. Moreover it increases the performance, and indexes web apps that also enhances UI/UX too.