18 posts tagged with "react"

I love the Material-UI (MUI) library for React. Hand on heart, I'm not very good at making UIs that are attractive. So I always grab for something to paper over the cracks. MUI is awesome for that.

One of the components that I use frequently is the tabs component. However, I've found that it can be a little tricky to use in a "text-first" way, that also remains strongly typed. This post documents how to do just that!

A new feature arrives with TypeScript 5.1, it is described as "Decoupled Type-Checking Between JSX Elements and JSX Tag Types".

It's all about handing control of JSX type definitions to libraries. With this feature, libraries can control what types are used for JSX elements. Why does this matter? Great question! Until version 5.1, TypeScript did an imperfect job of representing what is possible with JSX. This feature allows libraries to do a better job of that, and we'll look into it in this post.

It's probably worth saying, that this is a complicated feature. If you don't understand it (and as the author of this post I'll confess that I had to work quite hard to understand it), that is okay. This is a low level feature that is only likely to be used by library / type definition authors. It's a primitive that will unlock possibilites for people writing JSX - but it's something that people will mainly feel the benefit of, without directly doing anything themselves, or necessarily noticing that things have changed for the better.

The React useState hook is a great way to persist state inside the context of a component in React. This post demonstrates a simple React hook that stores state in the URL querystring, building on top of React Routers useSearchParams hook.

The upgrade of the React type definitions to support React 18 involved some significant breaking changes. This post digs into that and examines what the upgrade path looks like.

People being able to discover your website when they search is important. This post is about how you can add structured data to a site. Adding structured data will help search engines like Google understand your content, and get it in front of more eyeballs. We'll illustrate this by making a simple React app which incorporates structured data.

React 18 alpha has been released; but can we use it with TypeScript? The answer is "yes", but you need to do a couple of things to make that happen. This post will show you what to do.

react-query has a weakly typed hook named useQueries. It's possible to turn that into a strong typed hook; this post shows you how.

When an application loads data, typically relatively few HTTP requests will be made. For example, if we imagine we're making a student administration application, then a "view" screen might make a single HTTP request to load that student's data before displaying it.

The tremendous Tanner Linsley recently released react-virtual. react-virtual provides "hooks for virtualizing scrollable elements in React".

JavaScript is famously single threaded. However, if you're developing for the web, you may well know that this is not quite accurate. There are Web Workers:

Progressive Web Apps are a (terribly named) wonderful idea. You can build an app once using web technologies which serves all devices and form factors. It can be accessible over the web, but also surface on the home screen of your Android / iOS device. That app can work offline, have a splash screen when it launches and have notifications too.

This is going out to all those people using react-select with 1000+ items to render. To those people typing into the select and saying out loud "it's so laggy.... This can't be... It's 2019... I mean, right?" To the people who read this GitHub issue top to bottom 30 times and still came back unsure of what to do. This is for you.

Love me some Font Awesome. Absolutely wonderful. However, I came a cropper when following the instructions on using the all new Font Awesome 5 with React. The instructions for standard icons work fine. But if you want to use brand icons then this does not help you out much. There's 2 problems:

I was recently checking out a very good post which explained how to upload images using React Dropzone and SuperAgent to Cloudinary.

Most applications I write have some need for authentication and perhaps authorisation too. In fact, most apps most people write fall into that bracket. Here's the thing: Auth done well is a *big* chunk of work. And the minute you start thinking about that you almost invariably lose focus on the thing you actually want to build and ship.

Everyone loves curry don't they? I don't know about you but I'm going for one on Friday.

I wrote a while ago about how I was using some different tools in a current project:

Some people fear change. Most people actually. I'm not immune to that myself, but not in the key area of technology. Any developer that fears change when it comes to the tools and languages that he / she is using is in the wrong business. Because what you're using to cut code today will not last. The language will evolve, the tools and frameworks that you love will die out and be replaced by new ones that are different and strange. In time, the language you feel you write as a native will fall out of favour, replaced by a new upstart.