

If you are a beginner, you probably shouldn't bother with a setup of Webpack and Babel yourself. Last but not least, there is already a great official way introduced by Facebook to start a React project: create-react-app comes without any build configuration which I can only recommend for anyone who is getting started with React. I hope this tutorial helps you with this adventure. and thus it makes sense to learn about them. In JavaScript you will have to deal with Webpack, Babel et al. Webpack, Babel) around your library or framework of choice. At some point, you will start to use the tools (e.g.
#Why use webpack with react how to
The tutorial is more about teaching people how to setup their own project without a third-party boilerplate project. I really appreciate any feedback, issue reports and improvements for it.įourth, the tutorial is not about the boilerplate project itself. People, who search about a React with Webpack setup, will hopefully always find an up to date version of this tutorial. If several of my tutorials reference this one tutorial to set up a React application with Webpack, I am forced to maintain it well. Third, a single source of truth has to be well maintained.

Whenever there are updates regarding React, Webpack, Babel or Hot Module Replacement, I can come back to this one tutorial to keep all other tutorials updated. Second, it helps me to maintain the React setup at one place. Also people from other websites started to use this tutorial as guide for getting started with React and Webpack. Instead, I had several reasons why I extracted the setup process from another article of mine.įirst, I can reuse it for all my other tutorials on my website whenever there is a React project setup involved. But the article is not my attempt to advertise yet another React boilerplate project. As you might know, uncountable React boilerplate projects and repositories were created that way. I always had to setup the project from scratch, however, eventually I have created my own boilerplate project on GitHub for it. Personally I bootstrapped a lot of React projects over the last years.

Hello world would work if you are into clichés.Īpp/components/Note.jsx import React from 'react' Įxport default class Note extends React.This tutorial is part 4 of 4 in the 'React Setup'-series. In this case, we will just want to show some text like Learn Webpack. We also need to define the Note component. See the end of this chapter for a comparison. Apart from that you may find ES6 classes neater than React.createClass. W> It is important to note that ES6 based class approach doesn't support autobinding behavior. You may find this alternative a little neater.

Then you can do class App extends Component. Consider the example below: function render() from 'react'. JSX is a superset of JavaScript that allows you to mix XMLish syntax with JavaScript. Instead, they use some intermediate format that is converted into it. Thus people usually don't write it by hand. Generating complex structures using the API becomes cumbersome fast. React provides a high level API for generating virtual DOM. If you are interested in the theory, check it out. T> Libraries such as Matt-Esch/virtual-dom focus entirely on Virtual DOM. As changes are made to virtual DOM, React will batch the changes to actual DOM as it sees best. React maintains a DOM of its own unlike all the libraries and frameworks before it. React introduced a concept known as virtual DOM to web developers. In a library based approach you have more flexibility, but also responsibility. Frameworks may be faster to pick up, but they can become harder to work with as you hit their boundaries. With React you will have to assemble your application from separate libraries. Frameworks tend to provide a lot of solutions out of the box. React isn't a framework like Angular.js or Ember. Although simple to learn, React provides plenty of power. Also, thanks to React Native the approach isn't limited just to web. What is React?įacebook's React has changed the way we think about front-end development. Nuclide, an Atom based IDE, has been developed with React in mind. Even IDEs such as WebStorm support it up to an extent. T> Common editors (Sublime Text, vim, emacs, Atom etc.) have good support for React. After that we have a good starting point for developing our application further. In this chapter we'll expand our configuration. Even though you can use React with other build tools, webpack is a good fit and quite straightforward to set up. Combined with webpack React becomes a joy to work with.
