Learn Babel, Leaflet and Tachyons

If you've ever worked on a website for a business, there's a good chance you've included a map.

A Google Map embed is sufficient for showing a location, but doesn't leave you many customization options.

React Leaflet to the rescue!

In this course, Colby Fayock will guide you through a series of lessons and challenges that will build your map making skills as you build out a web app for a fictional restaurant.

You'll get practice with handling API keys and using React Hooks to implement a custom interactive map complete with metadata and additional overlays.

This course has built-in challenges that you are encouraged to pause and work through, but feel free to just watch.

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

Build Maps with React Leaflet

In this collection, you'll learn the basics of creating a new map in your React application with React Leaflet. We'll walk through adding the map itself as well as adding markers with popups, different shapes, and increasingly complex features to your map!

Mapping with React Leaflet

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

Vue (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is very easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

You can easily add CSS libraries to Nuxt using `yarn` or `npm` to install them, then simply adding them to the `nuxt.config.js` so they're included in each page. Then all the classes will be available for use in all of your templates. This lesson walks your through installing a library then adding it to your `nuxt.config.js`.

Add CSS Libraries to Nuxt

Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.

leaflet

Leaflet makes creating maps in the browser *dead simple*. With some HTML and 3 lines of JavaScript, we can quickly have a map displaying.

Get Started with LeafletJS Mapping

With a basic map in place we can add shapes, like US states. We will then see how to style the shapes to make a visually appealing map.

Adding Shapes to Maps with Leaflet and GeoJSON

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

Functional css for humans.

Quickly build and design new UI without writing css.

tachyons

Tachyons provides extensions (-ns, -m, and -l) to many of its classes to help you design for responsive layouts. This lesson walks you through designing for mobile first then adding a design for desktop.

Design for Mobile First with Tachyons

Rendering GeoJSON data on a map and interacting via mouse over, mouse out, and click.

Interactive Leaflet Maps with GeoJSON data

Building responsive css layouts is critical in any modern website. Tachyons makes this easy by designing for mobile first then enabling you to switch directions and positions of elements when the site scales up to desktop sizes. This lesson walks you through using Tachyons with flexbox and leveraging the `flex-column` and `flex-row` classes to respond to mobile and desktop sizes.

Build Responsive CSS Layouts with Tachyons

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)

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

Webpack loaders are how you tell webpack to resolve your dependencies and you can use a loader built for the babel transpiler to easily enable ES6 code in your project. Full sourcemap support is also available using webpack's devtool property.

Webpack Loaders, Source Maps, and ES6

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

In this lesson, you will learn how to add a map to your React application using React Leaflet. We will walk through importing and configuring the Map and TileLayer components from React Leaflet to set up the new map.

Create a New Map using React Leaflet

In this lesson, you will learn how to add a Marker and Popup component to a Map when using React Leaflet. We'll walk you through importing the components and adding each one to the Map. Additionally, we'll resolve an issue with loading marker images that's inherent to creating a new React Leaflet map in Create React App, which we'll fix by manually importing the image from Leaflet and configuring those images to the marker.