A few weeks ago, I implemented redux on my react project now renamed topheman/react-es6-redux.
What is Redux ?
Redux is a library made by Dan Abramov that evolves the ideas of Flux, avoiding its complexity (and lots of boilerplate). You can use it anywhere (client/server) with any library. Its goal is to solve the problem of state management in applications.
To do that, you have a single store that holds the state of your whole app as an object.
This store dispatches actions (make this kind of call from anywhere inside your app).
Those actions will pass through “reducers” which will process them and return a new state: (previousState, action) => newState (they are called “pure function” because no matter what, given the same arguments, they should always return the same result – no side effects).
Since all the app state exists in one place, you can combineReducers (split them so that they’ll each handle their part of the state).
This was a very short description of what is redux – more infos on redux.js.org.
How about functional programming ?
This paradigm has been around for a long time (it was there before Object Oriented programming) and if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve been using it for sure. I have been using both but I must say that I did learned design patterns in OOP but I never took any real interest in functional programming until recently, mostly because I was used to OOP.
What’s great with Redux is that if you digg just a little, you’ll learn a lot about:
- immutability
- functional programming
- ES6+
If you’re doing UI in JavaScript, you should embrace those. Don’t be afraid, we’re already developping in ES6, you might find very interesting the approach of functional programming and immutability …
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