React - Say "No" to Complexity

React is a web app framework from Facebook that focuses on the view portion. It emphasizes building UIs from components, most of which only use data that is directly passed to them.
This results in components that are easy to understand, reuse, and test.

React applications naturally divide into code that addresses two separate concerns. The first is what a component should render when given certain data. The second is how events
should modify the state of the application. React handles determining the minimum set of DOM changes that are required to update the UI based on changes to the state.
This is done efficiently through use of a “virtual DOM”. Changes to this can be quickly “diffed” against the previous version.

There are great options for the aspects of web apps that are not handled by React.
For routing, many people use react-router. For Ajax, commonly used libraries include Fetch and axios. For immutable data structures, the Immutable library from Facebook is recommended. For data management (state), Redux is becoming a defacto standard.

This talk covers everything you need to know in order to get started using React.

About Mark Volkmann

Mark Volkmann is a partner at Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) in St. Louis where he has provided software consulting and training since 1996. As a consultant, Mark has assisted many companies with Java, XML, Web, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, and AngularJS application development.

Mark has created and taught many courses on topics including: Java, Swing, XML, Ruby, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, and AngularJS.

Mark is a frequent presenter at St. Louis area user groups. He has written for XML Journal and the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) magazine. He has presented at the XML DevCon, NFJS and Strange Loop conferences.

Mark frequently writes articles on various software development topics. These can be found at http://ociweb.com/sett.

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