Redux Essentials, Part 1: Redux Overview and Concepts
As we mentioned earlier, Redux is a standalone library that can be used with different JavaScript frameworks including Angular, Inferno, Vue, Preact, React, etc. In the ever-evolving why redux world of web development, new JavaScript libraries are always being released. But chasing after each new release without fully understanding their benefits isn’t a good idea.
To go back to our eCommerce example, this could be the items in your shopping cart, suggested items, what page you’re on in a list of products, or the result of a search. Redux https://deveducation.com/ manages all this data by keeping it in one single place, called the “store”. Essentially, Redux is a JavaScript library that helps manage the state of your application.
What Are Reducers in Redux?
Redux Thunk is simple to use and Promises are familiar to many developers, Redux Saga Generators are more powerful but you will need to learn them. But both the two middleware can coexists, so you can start with Thunks and introduce Saga Generators when you need them. You just need to export the store from the module where it created with createStore(). Redux is a tool for managing state throughout the application. You need to keep your application state as small as possible. Only do it makes a lot of sense to keep something there Or if it makes your life easier when using Dev Tools.
- Unlike Redux, which can be overwhelming for beginners and can require a lot of boilerplate code, Zustand provides a clean and concise way to manage the state in React.
- While nothing is entirely future-proof, Redux is a safe bet for long-term projects.
- For example, the Redux library includes a set of utility functions that make it easy to integrate Redux with React.
- So when we again call the dispatch with type INCREMENT, the first if condition will be executed again.
The first if condition inside the reducer function will be executed. It will increment the state value to 1 which was initially initialized to 0 using ES6 default parameter syntax. Redux provides a single store that you can use to manage a large amount of data.
What are the three principles that Redux follows ?
So whenever you need to change/update the state of your Redux application, you need to dispatch an action. Well, at first these 9 words give you the feeling of 90 incomplete sentences where you don’t get anything. Well, the documentation has explanatory stuff when you start reading it. You may also have a lot of data changing in your application over time. So in the above example, we first make a copy of the entire state using the spread operator …state. Then we increment the noOfItemInCart by 1, update the cart array by adding the new object passed in the action.payload shown below, and then finally return the updated object.
Notice at line 9 that we are wrapping our component with withRedux. We can also wrap the individual pages, but that is not recommended; when we navigate from one page to another, if that particular page is not wrapped, it will crash. The only thing we are doing here is defining the authState in our store and creating the action for setting the authState named setAuthState. This project aims to demonstrate how to use Redux, so I am keeping things simple here so we can focus on the Redux integration with Next. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to use Redux in a Next application.
Some nice things you can do with Redux are logging, hot reloading, time travel, universal apps, recording, replay, etc. There can either be one reducer if it is a simple app or multiple reducers taking care of different parts or slices of the global state in a bigger application. Instead, if anyone wants to change the state of the application, then they’ll need to express their intention of doing so by emitting or dispatching an action. Redux was originally designed to be used with React, so Redux is certainly good with React. The two libraries are often used together to build complex web applications. One major benefit of Redux is the ability to navigate through the state’s history, allowing developers to observe how the state has changed throughout the app’s lifecycle.
For managing and updating the application state Redux used events known as “action”. As you can see in the example above, the component does not need to provide any state or method for its children components to share data among themselves. Everything is handled by Redux, which greatly simplifies the app and makes it easier to maintain. They are the only way you can send data from your application to your Redux store. The data can be from user interactions, API calls, or even form submissions. 💡 store refers to the object that holds the application data shared between components.
You can think of it as “reducing the array down to one value”. “Reducer” functions get their name because they’re similar to the kind of callback function you pass to the Array.reduce() method. We’ll look at where and how this is important a bit later, as well as some easier ways to write immutable update logic. In order to update values immutably, your code must make copies of existing objects/arrays, and then modify the copies. This page will focus on showing you how to use Redux the right way, and explain just enough of the concepts so that you can understand how to build Redux apps correctly.