Learn Alpine, Babel and Canvas

Welcome to this beginner level series on Alpine JS! 👋🏞

Alpine JS is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behaviour in your markup. It brings declarative, reactive, data-driven nature of libraries like React or Vue to your HTML templates.

In this series, you will learn about Alpine's handy **directives**. You'll discover how to define a component scope with `x-data`, run code on mount with `x-init`, attach event listeners with `x-on`, display data with `x-text`, decide wether or not to show an element with `x-show`, iterate through data with `x-for`, retrieve a DOM element with `x-ref`, learn how to achieve _two-way data binding_ with `x-model`, and much more.

You'll also learn how **"modifiers"** can be applied and chained to directives to provide additional functionality: control the animation transition of entering and leaving DOM elements, debounce an event listener, etc.

We'll also touch on what Alpine calls **"magic properties"**, which give you access to native browser events (`$event`), reference to DOM elements (`$refs`), and more.

You'll gradually discover Alpine's API and syntax, from building simple tabs to a mini app that fetches a dog picture based on a "breed" search field. 🐶

**Get ready to breathe some fresh air** - it's time to walk into cool, green Alpine pastures! 🏞

Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost.

You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit.

alpine

Sprinkle declarative, reactive behaviour on your HTML with Alpine JS

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

Converting all of our modern JavaScript into ES5 compatible syntax is a great way to use modern features while targeting older browsers. What happens when the browsers natively support these language features? Then it no longer makes sense to transform that code or to include polyfills that will go unused. In this lesson, we’ll add the `@babel/polyfill` package and configure `babel-preset-env`

Target specific browsers with babel-preset-env and the babel pollyfill

A <canvas> element provides scripts with a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.

canvas

The `canvas` element exposes a 2d context which allows you to draw lines using the `moveTo`, `lineTo`, and `stroke` api. You can combine this with Mouse events to make a simple drawing app.

Draw with Your Mouse on an HTML Canvas

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

We take the opengraph image we wrote in codesandbox and copy it into our serverless function. We use Rollup to compile the component into an IIFE (immediately invoked function expression) that can run in our headless browser environment and cover a wide set of rollup plugins that we need for compatibility. We end the lesson having successfully screenshot our opengraph react component from our Netlify Function

Compiling a React to an IIFE with Rollup to execute and render in a headless browser

In this lesson, we learn how the `x-init` directive in Alpine JS lets us run a JavaScript expression once the component has initiated.

We see the nuances that allow us to trigger that code before Alpine performs initial DOM updates, or after these updates have been made.

Focus in input field on page load with `x-init` in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we define a "count" state value with the `x-data` directive provided by Alpine JS. This defines a new scoped component, which can have access to this state.

We then display the "count" value in our HTML with the `x-text` directive, which updates an element's `innerText` value.

We also hook up buttons with click event listeners with `x-on:click`, which allows us to modify the count value as desired.

Update a count state value with the x-on event listener directive in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we create a set of tabs with Alpine JS, where only the content of the currently active tab is visible. To do this, we define an `activeTab` state value with `x-data. We then wire up our buttons to change the value of `activeTab` on click, and use `x-show` to determine if the tab content should be visible or not, based on the value of `activeTab`.

We also take control of the `class` attribute with `x-bind`, and we conditionally output an "active" class based on, you guessed it, the value of `activeTab`.

Toggle visibility and styles based on state with `x-show` and `x-bind` in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we move the component definition to a function, defined in a script tag in the HTML document.

We then iterate through an Array of Objects with the `x-for` directive in Alpine JS. We use a `<template>` tag to wrap the HTML element we want to repeat for each item, and put the `x-for` directive on that template tag.

We also define a "computed" property by adding a method on our function, which checks if a given ID matched the currently active tab id. This computed property allows us to determine wether or not to apply the "active" classname to our tab buttons.

Iterate through data with the `x-for` attribute in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we smoothen the transitions between tabs by applying a `transition` modifier to our `x-show` directive.

We see how we can ignore the leaving elements, and focus the animation on the entering elements. We tweak the transition duration and origin by chaining additional modifiers to our `x-show` directive.

Control enter and leave transitions with the `x-show.transition` modifier in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we see how the `x-model` directive makes achieving "two-way data binding" effortless in Alpine JS.

We see what it would take to recreate the same functionality with an `x-bind` directive for the input value, as well as an `@input` event listener which, thanks to an access to the browser's native events via the `$event` magic property, sets the state value to `$event.target.value`.

Keep a DOM input and state value in sync with the `x-model` directive in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we learn how to retrieve a DOM element via the `x-ref` directive in Alpine JS, which gives us a reference to the element it is applied on. In our case, an input field.

We can then use the `$refs` object, and reach for the ref we need to target.

This allows us to trigger the focus state of the input field, with the `.focus()` method.

Focus an input field on button click with `x-ref` and the `$refs` property in Alpine JS

In this lesson, we build a little app that fetches dog photos from the dog.ceo API, based on a "breed" search field. We want the API call to happen again when the search value changes, and to do so we use the `$watch` property from Alpine JS, which lets us define what state property we want to watch, and what callback function to run when a change happens.

We also use the `debounce` modifier on the `x-model` property to avoid firing an API call on each keystroke.

Refetch API data when a state value changes with the `$watch` property in Alpine JS

Welcome to this beginner level series on Alpine JS! 👋🏞

Alpine JS is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behaviour in your markup. It brings declarative, reactive, data-driven nature of libraries like React or Vue to your HTML templates.

This is the series intro video. Let's get started!

Series Intro - Beginner Level Alpine JS

Learn some of the different ways you can affect the graphical content that you are drawing to a canvas. We'll cover global alpha, global composite operations and shadows.

Canvas Effects

With the HTML `canvas` you can easily draw text as well as graphics. Let's take a look at basic text manipulation on the canvas.

Drawing Text on Canvas

In this lesson, we cover several different ways to animate graphics drawn to Canvas.

Animating with Canvas

When drawing on the HTML5 canvas element, your fills aren't limited to flat colors. You can use gradients to get smoothly blended color fills on your drawn elements.

Gradient Fills on the HTML5 Canvas

We can write our package using the latest JavaScript syntax with a compilation step. In this lesson we will install `babel-cli` and `babel-preset-latest` and wire up a `build` script to compile our code using the babel “latest” preset when source files change. This means those using our package can use it in any version of JavaScript even though we are using the latest syntax for our source code.

Set up compilation of source code using babel with npm scripts

Transformations can change the default canvas coordinate system and create complex drawings with much less code.

Canvas Transformations

In this lesson, listening for and handling mouse and keyboard events in Canvas is covered.

Listening for Mouse and Keyboard Events with HTML Canvas

The HTML Canvas element allows us to access powerful drawing APIs from JavaScript. In this lesson, the first in a series, we will learn about `<canvas>`, and get ready to start drawing.

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