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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Simple Webapp example using Flux with React

If you've been following the latest Front-End news for Web for the past year,
you have probably seen the huge buzz around ReactJS.

Just in case you haven't, you can visit ReactJS on the Facebook Github's page at: https://facebook.github.io/react/ or just Google it and read about it.

So for those of you that do know what React is all about, you may have also heard about Flux.
If you haven't :) I recommend you to read about it a bit
here as well http://facebook.github.io/flux/docs/overview.html

If I have to try and sum it up on one leg, I'd say that Flux is an application architecture for building
big web-apps on the front-end that scale.  - Well, that's pretty vague :)

A main concept regarding this architecture is about a Uni-directional flow where an "Action"
(a Application Event) is triggered by the View part (Your components, which are shown the users),
using a "Dispatcher" (Some kind of an Event Hub) which propagates the Actions
on to the "Stores" (Your application's model), which hold the state (data) of your application,
perform the necessary update and logic, and updates the View back using listeners.

This illustration might help understanding the Flux flow a little better:









Why is Flux a good idea? - There are several reasons, but I will mention only 2 which I think
are the most important.

1. Simple Application Architecture - You can show this diagram to someone who never
heard of Flux before, and explain it in 2 minutes.

2. Scalable - Flux lets you scale. Meaning, it's relatively easy to add new features to
your application, debug it, and keeping it performant.

Why?
There's a really good talk about it by Facebook which is worth watching:


After all that being said, I really wanted to do some basic implementation of Flux myself,
to "feel" how it works. And so I created a very small Repository on Github that implements
Flux which you are welcome to look at and use.

The example code

The application built on top of that is a classic Todo App: https://github.com/nirgit/Flux1

The code uses several 3rd party libraries such as RequireJS and React Templates but even if you are not familiar with RequireJS, or with AMD, my guess is you will still be able to understand how
it works.
React Templates is an amazing 3rd party library that helps you implement the "render" method
of React Components in an HTML like syntax. Totally cool.

Good luck!