Learn Babel, Flux-architecture and Twit

In this course we’ll learn how to create Twitter bots. We’ll first learn how to interface with the Twitter API using Twit.js, which allows us to post statuses, search tweets, and interact with followers. We’ll create several example bots that show the diversity of possibilities, using powerful tools such as RiTa.js, Google’s Cloud Vision API, and Tracery. We’ll learn how to tweet data from Google Spreadsheets, and to compose and tweet a song for an audio bot. We’ll also learn how to host our bot logic on Heroku and Docker. 

Twitter API Client for node

Supports both the REST and Streaming API.

twit

Create your own twitter bots

As a React application grows, so does the needs for organization and patterns. How do components communicate? How do we manage state across the application? How is data shared between components? 

These are the questions that Flux was built to answer.

In this series, we will explore React Flux, using ES6 (ES2015), babel, and webpack to manage our developer workflow.

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

React: Flux Architecture (ES6)

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

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'll look at an overview of how Flux works, setup our application structure and tools, and create our first component.

Flux Architecture: Overview and Project Setup

We’ll get a real-time stream of tweets, and learn how to filter a stream by keyword, location, and user.

Use the Twitter Stream API with Twit.js

In this lesson we'll create a very simple application dispatcher utilizing the open source flux dispatcher from Facebook.

Flux Architecture: Application Dispatcher

In this lesson we'll create our Flux application's store which will manage the state of our application.

Flux Architecture: Application Store

In this lesson we'll create our initial components using the architecture we've built so far.

Flux Architecture: Components/Views

In this lesson we'll shift the responsibility of managing the state of our application over to a higher-order component rather than having each component managing it's own state.

Flux Architecture: Higher-Order Components

In this lesson we'll organize our components by feature.

Flux Architecture: Project Organization

Using our established architecture we'll make short work of a few remaining tasks to meet our application requirements.

Flux Architecture: Component Wrap Up

In this lesson we'll simplify future development by reducing the logic contained in our application's store.

Flux Architecture: Dumb Stores

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

In this lesson we'll build our actions which will be sent to our dispatcher.

Flux Architecture: Application Actions

In this lesson we'll introduce routing into our application using react-router 1.0

Flux Architecture: Routing with react-router 1.0

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

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

In this lesson, our bot will tweet hello to the Twitter world! We'll do this by using Twit's POST method to post our status to the statuses/update endpoint.

Post Statuses with Twit.js

In this lesson, we’ll create multiple functions to request, download, and save photos and data from NASA's API, and then have our bot upload these photos to Twitter and post them along with their descriptions. We'll also learn how to tweet videos using a video from NASA’s space archives.

Tweet Media Files with Twit.js

We’ll learn how your bot can get its list of followers, follow people, and look up friendships. We'll use Twit's GET method to get our followers at the followers/list endpoint, to get the users we follow at the friends/ids and friends/list endpoints, and to look up our friendships with the friendships/lookup endpoint. We'll also use Twit's POST method to follow someone at the friendships/create endpoint, and to send messages by posting to the direct_messages/new endpoint. 

Work with Users in Twit.js

We’ll learn the basics of interacting with tweets, including retweeting, deleting, favoriting, and replying to tweets. We'll get our home timeline by using Twit's GET method to access the `statuses/home_timeline` endpoint, including the count parameter, which lets us get back a certain number of tweets. We'll also pass it a callback. We'll learn how to cycle through the data (the tweets) we get back and see what information is included. We'll learn how to retweet statuses by posting to `statuses/retweet` and including the tweet id. We can unretweet by posting to `statuses/unretweet` with the same tweet id. We'll also learn how to like a tweet by posting to `favorites/create` with a tweet id, and unlike a tweet by posting to `favorites/destroy` with a tweet id. We'll also learn how to reply to a tweet by posting to `statuses/update`, with a status that includes the handle of the user we're replying to and `in_reply_to_status_id` parameter, which is the id of the tweet we're replying to. We'll learn how to delete a tweet by posting to `statuses/destroy` with the tweet's id. 

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