README.md

Easy React App

This repo provides the starting block to create a new modular and easy to mantain react App.

Despite being a simple App, it presents some powerful features.

Functional programming

This App has been created with multiple functional programming patterns in mind. In particular, it makes use of Maybe monad for anything done asynchronously and the redux store is an immutable data structure. This will allow us to write beautifully declerative code.

To combine these powerful patterns, the store has a custom middleware that manages the async actions and returns the correct monad.

Why using monads instead of other patterns like redux-saga?

Libraries like redux-saga make writing actions more imperative, with the use of generators, that in turn require a different action type for every case: LOAD_TODO_LOADING, LOAD_TODO_SUCCESS, etc. complicating the code even more.

By using a monad, the action type is always the same and it is only the payload do change. The result, is components that, even when depending on async calls, still look easy to understand.

For example:

const people = props => {
  const renderPeople = () => props.people.get('loadPeopleResult').matchWith({
    Empty: () => 'Loading',
    Loading: () => 'Loading',
    Success: ({data}) => data.toJS().map(p => <Person key={p.url} {...p} />),
    Failure: ({error}) => `Something went wrong: ${error.message}`
  });
  
 return (
    <div>
        Here is our people:
        {renderPeople()}
    </div>
 )
}

Reusable connections

The most common way of connecting components is by creating the connect() function directly inside the component. While this works fine, it creates a lot of repetition, as multiple components can require the same state/actions. For this reason, the connections live in a separate folder /bridge where they can be shared among multiple components, reducing redundancy.

Other notes

In the codebase, there is a lot of code borrowed from other previous projects I worked on. In particular, the common/fn.js file is a collection of utils I used with time (mainly for FP). As your projects grows, always check if there is anything you can use from there!