Learn Alpine, Jspm and Mdx

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

MDX has grown rapidly since the first commit two and a half years ago. We'd like to celebrate our accomplishments so far, and talk about what lies ahead. We've got lots of plans.
Learn how MDX increases developer productivity, improves educational content authoring, and even peek behind the curtains to see how MDX works.

MDX is an authorable format that lets you seamlessly use JSX in your markdown documents. You can import components, like interactive charts or notifications, and export metadata. This makes writing long-form content with components a blast.



MDX Conf 2020

jspm is a package manager for the SystemJS universal module loader, built on top of the dynamic ES6 module loader.

jspm

JSPM can handle installed packages, transpiling ES6, and bundling all from the command-line. This video gives a quick overview of install JSPM, installing packages with JSPM, writing a very simple app in ES6 that uses those packages, then bundling up for production.

An Introduction to JSPM (JavaScript Package Manager)

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 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 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

Monica Powell, creator of React Ladies, talks through why someone would migrate from Remark to MDX before going into how to do that and what problems you might run into.

Migrating to MDX

Cole Bemis explains how MDX works by taking us though his own journey digging into what MDX does under the hood.

Demystifying MDX

Laurie Barth walks us through MDX v2's syntax by trying to break it. She starts at markdown syntax and takes us through increasingly complex applications of MDX, including passing dynamic props to .mdx files imported into other .mdx files.

MDX v2 Syntax

Jonathan Bakebwa introduces MDX support for VueJS and NuxtJS while also using Chakra UI Vue for MDX components

MDX and VueJS/NuxtJS

Prince Wilson, MDX contributor, takes us through one aspect of his personal site playground and dives deep into interactive code blocks.

Personal Site Playgrounds with MDX

Rodrigo Pombo introduces [Code Hike](https://codehike.org/) and talks through how Code Hike and MDX empower advanced scrolly telling techniques.

The X in MDX

Kathleen McMahon walks us through a real-world MDX digital garden implementation

Digital Gardening with MDX Magic

By leveraging the [dependency graph](https://nx.dev/l/r/structure/dependency-graph), [Nx](https://nx.dev) is able to understand which parts in the monorepo changed and thus trigger actions on those nodes, such as building an app, running tests or linting. This already works out of the box. However, with our portfolio application, all of our markdown articles reside in the root-level `_articles` folder. Those are not captured by the Nx dependency graph and thus Nx would not correctly detect a change to our Next.js site application whenever we change or add a new markdown article.
In this lesson, we learn how to register our `_articles` folder s.t. it appears as a dedicated node in the Nx dependency graph.

Prefer to read along as well? Here's the [accompanying article](https://blog.nrwl.io/publishing-a-next-js-app-to-vercel-with-nx-df81916548f5).

Register our Markdown Articles with the Nx Dependency Graph

**NOTE:** `workspace.json` is deprecated, you can update to `project.json` [here](https://nx.dev/deprecated/workspace-json).

One cool aspect of Next.js is its [fast refresh](https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/fast-refresh) support. Whenever you change some Next.js component it automatically refreshes the page without hard reloading everything. However, you might notice that whenever we change something within our MDX markdown files, fast refresh is not capturing that, hence we need to manually refresh the browser window.

In this lesson, we learn how to leverage a feature of Nx to create a "[custom Next.js development server](https://nx.dev/l/r/next/server#customserverpath)". We are going to use [chokidar](https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar) to watch our articles folder and then invoke a private API on the Next.js server instance to trigger a reload command.

Prefer to read along as well? Here's the [accompanying article](https://blog.nrwl.io/hot-reload-mdx-changes-in-next-js-and-nx-c05252cf450a).

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