Evan Schultz
Hooks landed in React a few months ago, and there has been a lot of excitement around them in terms of figuring out how to best use them, best practices, and how they map to current concepts in React and the lifecycle.
JavaScript and its ecosystem are evolving at a rapid pace. As new frameworks, libraries, and features get added JavaScript fatigue can start to set in.
Forms, like death and taxes, are one of the unavoidable aspects of web development. From Login Forms, Contact Pages, to heavy form-centric applications - at some point, you will need to wire up an input field to your application state. Working with forms in React can require a bit of boilerplate, and while there are libraries like Formik, Redux Form or React Redux Form can help make things easier, they can be overkill for many situations.
Although we usually know what components are needed when building most views within an app, sometimes we don't know what they are until runtime. This means we need to build a screen based on the application state, user preferences, or response from an API. A common case is building dynamic forms, where the questions and components needed are either configured by a JSON object, or where fields change based on the users' answers.
Unit tests can be an invaluable tool in the developers toolbox. You don't need to be a strict TDD purist to make unit testing worthwhile. Once you get into the flow of writing tests, it can be rather satisfying to watch the Nyan Cat Reporter go across your screen as the number of tests passing increase.
Angular 2 RC5 was released was released last week. Looking through the change log of bug fixes and new features shows a lot of progress has been made. However, I experienced a sinking feeling after reading several pages of Breaking Changes about the introduction of @NgModule and changing how we need to bootstrap our applications.
As Redux is becoming more popular within the Angular community, it's not always clear how to bridge the gap between working with Redux and how to make it fit naturally with Angular 2.
**This post currently reflects an earlier version of Angular, and may not be up to date or reflect the current release. ** Angular 2 has greatly simplified services since Angular 1 . In Angular 1, there was a service, factory, provider, delegate, value, constant, etc. and it wasn't always clear when to use which.