Learn Algolia, Lodash and Svelte

JavaScript community has been shaken recently by a release of Svelte 3 and for a good reason - it's a completely different approach than React or Vue. To quote the docs:

"[Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app."

**The best part?** If you have 26 spare minutes you can learn the basics of Svelte 3 and start building your own apps with it!

Enjoy!



The magical disappearing UI framework

 - The web's JavaScript bloat crisis, solved. Svelte turns your templates into tiny, framework-less vanilla JavaScript.
 - Simple and familiar. Build apps out of composable, easy-to-write blocks using languages you already know.
 - Super fast, rock solid. Compile-time static analysis ensures the browser does no more work than it needs to.

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Up and running with Svelte 3

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

[Lodash](https://lodash.com/docs/) is a collection of utilities that have become a staple of modern web development. This collection will show you how to re-create its most common methods using simple JavaScript techniques available in any modern web browser. In addition to re-building tools like `_.merge`, `_.get` and `_.debounce` from scratch you will also learn how to replace them completely in some cases with modern syntax such as [optional chaining](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining), [nullish coalescing](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Nullish_coalescing_operator) and [Object.fromEntries](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/fromEntries).

This collection should interest the following groups:
- Those who want to better understand common JavaScript patterns
- Engineers who want to reduce their dependence on Lodash (for performance or other reasons)
- Candidates preparing for a technical job interview (where it is common to be asked how to implement some of these methods).

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

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Recreating Popular JavaScript Utility Methods from Lodash

Creating forms is one of the simplest and most complicated things at the same time. A basic form consists of many different things happening, we have to retain the value, we have to keep watch of validation and we have to show error messages when something is invalid, this is on both the fields and on the entire form itself if we send a request off to the backend service.

So we're going to create a form using just the normal svelte features. Then we'll look into creating a form using the svelte forms lib. 

Create forms in Svelte with Svelte Forms Lib

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

Svelte is a new approach to building user interfaces. 

Instead of doing the vast majority of work at the runtime as other frameworks do, Svelte shifts that work into the _compile_ step which happens when you build your app. As such, you're shipping heavily optimized code to your users.

In this quick lesson we are going to learn how to create a brand new project with Svelte 3 from scratch.

Create a new project with Svelte 3

In most Web applications we want to be able to render different HTML markup depending on values passed in from JavaScript code.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to render JavaScript variable in HTML markup when using Svelte 3.

Add data to HTML markup using Svelte 3

In Svelte 3, the same as in regular HTML we can add CSS styles to a component and this is what we're going to learn in this lesson.

Important note - styles are _scoped to the component_ which means that if we style a `h1` tag in component A, it won't automatically affect `h1` tags in component B.

Add styles to Svelte 3 component

It's highly unlikely that we'd like to have an entire app in a single file. Instead, what we'd like to do is to spread our code across multiple components and render them in one another.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to create a `<Surname />` Svelte 3 component which we're going to use in our main `App.svelte` file to display a user's surname.

Create a new Svelte 3 component to render it inside of another component

One of the key advantages of having a component system is the ability to render the component differently based on what kind of properties (shortened to 'props' in Svelte) were passed in to the component.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to declare properties inside of a Svelte component and how to pass in data to be rendered inside of a `<UserInfo />` component. We're also going to learn how to use default props which are used if a value for a property was not passed in.

Declare and pass in properties to a Svelte 3 component

Svelte automatically updates the DOM when your component's state changes. Often, some parts of a component's state need to be computed from other parts. This is where _reactive declarations_ come in.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to use reactive declarations to re-compute (and render) square of a counter value in a simple counter example whenever user clicks on a button.

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