Post Category → Build Systems

Introducing MDXC: A new way to write Markdown for React

Read the README and browse the source on GitHub, or mess around with the live demo.

Markdown is a fantastic tool. It makes writing simple. Markdown documents are plain text, so you don’t need to worry about tags and HTML and all that. You just write. And when you need a <a>, or a <h1>, it’s already there. It’s like magic!

But say you’re writing a React app with pushState, and you don’t want your links to use <a> tags; they break your smooth navigation. You want them to use react-router or react-junctions’ <Link> tags instead. And you’re shit outta luck, because you can’t. Or you couldn’t, before MDXC.

MDXC is a tool to make Markdown and React best buddies. Unlike traditional Markdown, MDXC produces actual JavaScript — not strings of HTML. MDXC lets you embed raw JSX within your Markdown, and even lets you import components and accept props. And to top it all off, MDXC lets you configure how each element is rendered, giving you all sorts of ways to confuse your users and also a few ways to genuinely improve their experience.

If you can’t tell yet, I’m pretty excited about MDXC. So please indulge me and take a gander at this example:

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How I learned to stop worrying and love the JSX

So you’ve heard the commotion about React, and thought you’d take a look. And you’ve liked what you’ve seen! Or you did, until you saw this:

<div onClick={this.handleClick}>JSX butters my toast</div>

OK. You’re happy to give a new technology the benefit of the doubt. But this? Didn’t we escape PHP years ago? And what ever happened to separation of concerns?!

But I’m here to reassure you that not everything is as it seems. The above code is not JavaScript-in-HTML. If anything it actually promotes separation of concerns, especially compared to “competitor framework A”. And its best feature?

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The Complete Guide to ES6 with Babel 6

Over the last year, Babel has become the go-to tool for transforming ES2015 and JSX into boring old JavaScript. Which makes it kinda hilarious that by default, Babel 6 no longer transforms either:

james$ echo "export function component() { return <div /> }" | babel
SyntaxError: unknown: Unexpected token (1:37)
> 1 | export function component() { return <div /> }
    |                                      ^

So what happened? Well, in the brave new world of Babel 6, you need to choose which transforms to run. This promotes separation of concerns, a decidedly good thing. It also tends to promote a “shit shit” moment when suddenly nothing works.

But luckily, this doesn’t mean that you’ll now need to comb through the bug trackers and documentation for seemingly every part of your build system. Instead, just follow these five guides to get your app, libraries, tasks and tests modernised in no time!

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Teaching Gulp ES6, with Babel 6

This guide is part of The Complete Guide to ES6 with Babel 6 series. If you’re having trouble upgrading to Babel 6, start with Six Things You Need To Know About Babel 6.

So you’ve written your app, your tests and your libraries in ES6. You’ve gotten so used to the new syntax that it feels unnatural even trying to write ES5. And this makes it all the more jarring when you add a Gulp file with an import statement, and suddenly this happens:

/unicorn-standard-boilerplate/gulpfile.js:1
(function (exports, require, module, __filename, __dirname) { import del from
                                                              ^^^^^^
SyntaxError: Unexpected reserved word

Oops, gulpfile.js only supports ES5. But lucky for you, teaching it ES6 is almost as simple as renaming a file. Almost…

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Testing in ES6 with Mocha and Babel 6

This guide is part of The Complete Guide to ES6 with Babel 6 series. If you’re having trouble upgrading to Babel 6, start with Six Things You Need To Know About Babel 6.

So you’ve written a useful little app with ES6, and being the excellent developer that you are, you want to test it. You’ve got some experience testing with Mocha, so you write a few tests and run them. And bam, nothing works. Why? Because by default, Mocha only knows ES5. But luckily, teaching Mocha ES6 only takes about a minute and 30 seconds!

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Writing NPM packages with ES6 using the Babel 6 CLI

This guide is part of The Complete Guide to ES6 with Babel 6 series. If you’re having trouble upgrading to Babel 6, start with Six Things You Need To Know About Babel 6.

Even if you write your NPM package with ES2015, it is important that the code you publish is compatible with everyone else’s JavaScript environments. That means compiling your code to ES5 before publishing it. And of course, the best way to do so is with the Babel CLI.

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The Six Things You Need To Know About Babel 6

Over the last year, Babel has become the go-to tool for transforming ES2015 and JSX into boring old JavaScript. But seemingly overnight, Babel 6 changed everything. The babel package was deprecated, running babel doesn’t actually transform ES2015 to ES5, and the old docs have basically disappeared.

But Don’t Panic! To get you up to speed, I’ve put together a brief list of the six most important changes. And if you need a little more help, my Complete Guide to ES6 with Babel 6 will walk you through the practical details; including the CLI, Webpack, Mocha and Gulp.

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