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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Writing Happy Stylesheets with Webpack

While the last few years have seen JavaScript turn from a tangle of jQuery into an orderly affair, CSS has been the subject of neglect. While JavaScript has learned new tricks like modularity, components and dependency bundling, most stylesheets are still a monolithic mess of globals.

But with the advent of Webpack, it is time for stylesheets to shine again. In fact, many of the lessons which JavaScript has learned can now be applied to SCSS and LESS too — leaving your stylesheets clean, independent, and most importantly, happy.

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Introducing react-pacomo: Automatic namespacing for className

So you’ve got a React application, and you want to style it. But no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get excited about the existing options.

Maybe you like how Inline Style eliminates globals, but don’t want to gamble on an untested technology which doesn’t play well with others. Or maybe you like the concept behind CSS Modules, but feel they are too heavyweight for your own application.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have the ease-of-use of Inline Style with the compatibility of CSS Modules? Say, something which automatically prefixes className props with a unique namespace? Actually, react-pacomo does exactly that. Build-process free. Without any modifications to your existing components. Almost like magic.

See react-pacomo in action in the Unicorn Standard Starter Kit.

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Why You Shouldn’t Style React Components With JavaScript

Update: I’ve announced react-pacomo, a solution for some of the problems with CSS outlined here, without the downsides of Inline Style.

So one of the hottest topics in the React world lately is Inline Style, i.e. setting styles with an element’s style property instead of CSS.

This new and shiny way of doing things promises to make your life easier. It eliminates the bugs caused by global styles, it allows you to package styles with your components, and it unifies the entire development process under the single language of JavaScript, fuck yeah. And now that all the cool kids are using it, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon too!

But don’t just take my word for it! See for yourself with this handy dandy list of all the problems which you could have fixed with plain old CSS if you hadn’t of drunk the cool-aid, and the new problems you’ll now have to deal with too.

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Join The Dark Side Of The Flux: Responding to Actions with Actors

Have you ever wanted to respond to a change in your Redux store’s state by dispatching another action?

Now you know that this is frowned on. You know that if you have enough information to dispatch an action after the reducer does its thing, then it is a mathematical certainty that you can do what you want without dispatching another action.

But for some reason, you just don’t care. Maybe your store is structured in such a way that it is easier to send requests after an action is processed. Maybe you don’t want your actions or components to be in charge of fetching remote data for each new route. Or maybe you’re just a dark side kind of person. Whatever the reason, actors will allow you to dispatch with impunity.

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Can I dispatch multiple actions from Redux action creators?

When using Redux, you may have come across a scenario where you’d like one action creator to dispatch multiple actions.

There are a few reasons you’d want to do this, but let’s consider the problem of handling a submit event from a form. In response, you’ll want to do multiple things. For example: RESET your form’s view model, POST your form’s data to the server, and also NAVIGATE to another route.

So should you dispatch separate actions for each of these behaviours, or instead dispatch a single action which is handled by each of the applicable reducers?

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Choosing a JavaScript Build Tool – Babel, Browserify, Webpack, Grunt and Gulp

When starting a new JavaScript project, one of the first things you’ll do is set up a build system. But with so many options, deciding on tools often gets in the way of building the app itself.

Imagine if there was a simple rule you could follow to choose which build tools to use – wouldn’t it be great being able to just get stuck into writing your app? Actually, after spending five years writing apps with automatic build systems, I’ve come upon just such a guide. I know what to use and where to use it — and after reading this article, you will too!

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Which Flux Implementation Should I Use With React?

So you’ve sifted through the seemingly infinite sea of JavaScript frameworks, and finally settled on React. But then you realise that React only solves half the problem, and everyone is now using Flux for the other half. But that’s ok — if Flux came from the same place as React, it should have a simple and easy-to-learn API, right?

Wrong.

Flux is like a framework for frameworks – frameworkception, as one redditor put it. There are as many implementations as there are opinions, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, and none of them with authority.

So what is a developer to do? Contribute to the malaise by rolling your own, like I did? Don’t do it! Instead, use Redux.

Wait, is it really that simple? Yes, it really is! But since you’re still reading, you’re probably not someone who is easily convinced. And that’s why I’ve prepared this comparison for you:

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Building a Router with Raw React

So you’ve decided to build a Single Page App with React, and everything seems to be going dandy. You’ve got yourself some wireframes, a HTML file and a few components, and then you decide to add some routes. Easy, right?

Well, thats what you thought until you started reading the internet. But now you’re worrying about isomorphism and the HTML 5 history API and even how to pass props to your view components again. And if you thought learning all this was painful, imagine rewriting your application when the routing library’s API breaks in a few weeks.

Routing doesn’t have to be complicated, so why stress yourself out with libraries when a hand-rolled router can take less than 20 lines? Especially seeing that if you’d have just kept following this guide, you would have had something working in only two minutes…

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React and pushState: You’re doing it wrong

In the world of React.js single-page apps, there are two types of routing: push-state, and hash-based. Each of these have their strengths and weaknesses.

Now as you may know, most of the React ecosystem focuses on push-state routing, using the HTML5 History API and (sometimes) server-side rendering with Node.js. There are a number of reasons for this, the two main ones being:

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