Learn Babel, Flow and Mdx

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

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

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

flow

We'll go over some of the built-in types in Flow and how to add them to our projects by adding type annotations to our variables in JavaScript. We'll also learn about type mismatch errors when we give a variable a value that doesn't match its type annotation and how to fix it.

Primitive Types in Flow

Let's learn how to set up Facebook's Flow inside of a project and write a simple typecheck task that will let us run Flow against any files in our codebase.

Up and Running with Facebook Flow for Typed JavaScript

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

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

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

Nuclide is the IDE Facebook employees use to write React code. But setting it up to use Flow type checking and Eslint to lint files on the fly is tricky. This video shows you how. 

Setup Nuclide to use Flow and Eslint (Mac)

Babel is a compiler that lets us right future JavaScript not yet fully in browsers (ES6 / ES2015, ES7 / ES2016, etc) and transpile it back into code that can be used now. We'll walk through installing babel, writing some future JS syntax, transpiling it, and running it in a browser.

**This lesson is out of date and uses an older version of Babel.**

Writing next generation JavaScript with Babel 5 (out of date)

In this lesson we are going to add types throughout our basic todo list component. This includes type checking the component props, local state, and property methods. 

Type Check React Components With Flow

In this lesson we are going to take a React and Redux application and add flow types throughout. This includes type checking a react component, a reducer, some actions, and a connect method. 

Type Check Redux Apps with Flow

In this lesson, we’ll install Babel and use it from the terminal to see how it can take JavaScript that uses modern language features and output JavaScript that will run in down-level browsers.

Transform Modern JavaScript Features with Babel

In this lesson, we'll configure webpack to use the Babel loader for our JavaScript files, allowing us to transpile our source files and generate a bundle for deploying our application.

Configure webpack to Load JavaScript Files through Babel with babel-loader

In this lesson, we'll add React and ReactDOM to our project and create an entry point for the React application. We'll also configure Babel with the React preset so Babel can transpile our JSX into JavaScript that will run in a browser.

Configure babel for React with preset-react

We transpile our JavaScript code so we can use modern language features, even if browser support isn't quite where we need it to be. This includes proposed features that aren't yet part of the official language specification. In this lesson, we'll see how we can support the proposed class property syntax for JavaScript with a Babel plugin.

Support Proposed JavaScript Features with Babel Plugins

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

One approach to building high performance applications with `webpack` is to take advantage of code-splitting to only load the needed JavaScript on initial load and asynchronously load additional JavaScript bundles when needed. In this lesson, we'll create add some code-splitting to our placeholder application and configure our project to support the dynamic `import()` syntax.

Asynchronously Load webpack Bundles through Code-splitting and React Suspense

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

**Note**:  Due to Netlify changing their handling, the path in `fs.readFileSync` is affected. Update to:
```js
const script = fs.readFileSync(path.resolve(__dirname, "image.js"), "utf-8");
```

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

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.

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