Sagar Ganatra's Blog

The title says it all. This is my third book with Packt Publishing and I wrote a book after four long years. In the last few months, I’ve spent my weekends writing this book and it was an arduous undertaking. Here’s the cover image: I have used React and React-Router in many projects and during the course of writing this book I’ve learned a great deal about these frameworks/libraries. This book is all about the ‘React-Router’ library and how you can use it any React application (web or native). The book covers the following topics: Chapter 1, Introduction to React Router 4 and Creating Your First Route , is an introduction to the component-based architecture in React and how you can get started with creating routes using the Route component from React Router. Chapter 2, Configuring Routes, Using Various Options in the Route Component , discusses various Route component props that can be used to match the requested URL location and how these matches can be used to render a com...

I have been writing applications using React and Redux for quite some time now and thought of trying other state management solutions out there. It's not that I have faced any issues with Redux; however, I wanted to explore other approaches to state management. I recently came across MobX  and thought of giving it a try. The library uses the premise of  `Observables` to tie the application state with the view layer (React). It's also an implementation of the Flux pattern wherein it uses multiple stores to save the application state; each store referring to a particular entity. Redux, on the other hand, uses a single store with top-level state variables referring to various entities.

When I visualize building an application, I would think of using React and Redux on the front-end which talks to a set of RESTful services built with Node and Hapi (or Express). However, over a period of time, I've realized that this approach does not scale well when you add new features to the front-end. For example, consider a page that displays user information along with courses that a user has enrolled in. At a later point, you decide to add a section that displays popular book titles that one can view and purchase. If every entity is considered as a microservice then to get data from three different microservices would require three http  requests to be sent by the front-end app. The performance of the app would degrade with the increase in the number of http requests. I read about GraphQL and knew that it is an ideal way of building an app and I need not look forward to anything else. The GraphQL layer can be viewed as a facade which sits on top of your RESTful services o...