5 STUNNING REACT JS LIBRARIES

If you are a developer interested in the promising frontend technology called React JS, you have definitely come across tech words Redux, Redux Saga, Enzyme, React Router, Material UI, more than any other. Here is a little more about these stunning React JS libraries you should be using while creating React based applications…

1. REDUX

Redux is a state container. It is an external open source library that is very often used with React JS applications to help in state management.
The important terms we should know about are the Redux STORE, Actions in Redux, and the Reducer.

Redux Store is the container storing the state of the app. A good practice with the React Store is to store the application state in a single object.

Redux Action is another fundamental aspect of Redux, and is the only way to change the state of the app.

Redux Reducer in the last primary actor in Redux. It interprets the actions and manipulates the app based on them. The role of the reducer is to give access the redux store.

Some of the reasons to learn Redux are that in larger apps with a lot of moving pieces, state management becomes a huge concern. Redux manages state quite well without performance or testability trade-offs.

The enriched developer experience through features that we get without doing much as a developer, is a major reason for many to adopt React and Redux. Using the Redux DevTools with the React Hot Loader enables features like hot reloading, debugging, logging, time travel.
For those looking to develop Isomorphic or universal apps, can use React Router v4 and Redux.

2. React Router

Routing is the mechanism by which HTTP requests are routed to the code that handles them. React Router is the standard routing library for React. Until v4 React Router used Static routing just like in Rails, Angular, Express, wherein routes are declared statically as part of app initialization. With v4, React introduced Dynamic Routing, or routing that takes place as the app is rendering. All React Router (v4) gives you is just Components. Dynamic routing not just utilizes component composition but solves all inconsistencies between routing and the react paradigm.

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3. REDUX SAGA

Redux-saga is a Redux middleware library, designed to handle side effects in a Redux app. It leverages from an ES6 feature called Generators, enabling us to write synchronous-looking asynchronous code, that is also easy to test. When an action is fired, something changes in the state of the app and there might be something that needs to be done, seemingly unrelated, but deriving from the app state. For example, in a simple chat application, when a user types a message, we immediately show the message on the screen. While this is done using the Redux Action and Reducer, we still need to send the message to the Websockets server. This can be done using Redux Saga.

Logging actions, reporting errors, asynchronous requests, can be handled using Redux Saga. Behind the scenes, being a middleware, Redux Saga intercepts Redux Actions, and injects its own functionality.

4. Enzyme

Enzyme is a JavaScript Testing utility for fast and easy React testing. It is used in conjunction with a test runner like Jest. While Enzyme makes it easier to assert, manipulate, and traverse the output of a React Component, it is useful in unit testing more complex React components that are not purely functional but also behavioural. Enzyme gives you the ability to target DOM elements in a clear and concise manner, while also simplifying the manipulation of components. Its all-powerful FIND function can be applied to HTML, JSX and CSS alike – this is fundamental to Enzyme! It enables us to target DOM elements in a simple and concise manner.

5. Material-UI in React JS

The most popular React UI framework- Material-UI is a set of React components that implement Google’s Material Design. And yet, Material-UI is not just an implementation of the Material Design guidelines, but a versatile UI library of components that can be utilized by many. This, more comprehensive implementation, brings not just the material design methodology into a product, but it also gives components and compositions that are otherwise not part of the design guidelines. With Material-UI, what we get is a compact, customizable, collection of beautiful components and utilities for React, following the Material Design specification.

Components in Material-UI, work in isolation. They are self-sufficient and only inject the styles that they need to display. They do not depend upon global style-sheets such as normalize.css.

Material-UI is theme-able and customizable, while also delivering responsiveness. It follows a mobile-first strategy, in which the site is first created with mobile devices in mind, and then adapted as necessary using CSS media queries.

Material-UI is a great way to add an elegant look and feel to the controls of a React site in less time and with little effort.