Learn Babel, React-router and Tachyons

React Router v4 takes an entirely new approach to routing and handling URLs in your React applications. It fully embraces the concept of declarative programming and a component based development process. In practice, this turns out to be very nice and gives you a routing solution that is less configuration heavy than many previous solutions.

In this course, you will learn about the basics of React Router v4 to help you get started. We will look at the core components that React Router supplies and how they interact together to create a robust routing solution for your React applications.

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.

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Add routing to React apps using React Router v4

React Router is the defacto router for any React application and it allows us to extract the state of our application from the browser's address bar.

In this course we'll explore the core features of React Router in common examples.  From routing with individual components to more complex routing consisting of multiple components, query-strings, route parameters,  and redirects.  

Getting Started with React Router v3

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

Routes are some times better served as a modal. If you have a modal (like a login modal) that needs to be routeable and appear on all pages you may need to use query params. Will explore how to render a route all the time and use query params to control when it's content renders

Create a Query Parameter Modal Route with React Router

Gatsby is a blazing fast static site generator built with React. Gatsby gives you all of the modern JavaScript tools you want; set up and ready to go out of the box.

gatsby

Restricting access to content that is delivered client-side in a Gatsby site takes a few steps. We use Netlify Identity to handle user authentication and reach router to build our auth-restricted client-side application.

Using Netlify Identity to control access to a Gatsby client-side dashboard route

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

React Router v4 doesn’t require a lot of configuration to run. The core examples will run out of the box with Create React App. In this lesson, you will create an application and get React Router v4 up and running.

_**note**: in this video `react-router-dom` is installed with the `--save-dev` flag. This is **not required and may cause issues if used**. Simply install it with `npm install react-router-dom` and it will function as expected._

Run the React Router v4 Examples with Create React App

React Router 4 has several routers built in for different purposes. The primary one you will use for building web applications is the BrowserRouter. In this lesson you will import the BrowserRouter and create some basic Route components.

Create Basic Routes with the React Router v4 BrowserRouter

setRouteWillLeaveHook provides a method for us to intercept a route change before leaving the current route.

React Router: setRouteWillLeaveHook

React-router is the community favourite routing solution - it can handle all of your complex routing needs and in this lesson we’ll cover what’s needed to enable it’s use within Preact. https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router

Integrate react-router with Preact

IndexRoute allows us to define a default child component to be rendered at a specific route when no other sub-route is available.

React Router: IndexRoute

We can use regular expressions to more precisely define the paths to our routes in React Router v4.

Use Regular Expressions with Routes with React Router v4

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 look at hashHistory which uses a hash hack to track our route changes vs browserHistory which delivers clean urls, but requires server work to implement

React Router: hashHistory vs browserHistory

Since react-router routes are components, creating nested routes is as simple as making one route a child of another in JSX.  In this lesson we'll explore nesting routes and accessing the children of parent routes.

React Router: Nested Routes

A router library is no good if we have to hardcode every single route in our application.  In this lesson we look at how to access variables in our routes and pass them into our components.

React Router: Route Parameters

In this lesson we'll learn how to render multiple component children from a single route.

React Router: Named Components

The Redirect component in react-router does exactly what it sounds like.  It allows us to redirect from from one route to another.

React Router: Redirect

If you’ve created several Routes within your application, you will also want to be able to navigate between them. React Router supplies a Link component that you will use to make this happen.

Use the React Router v4 Link Component for Navigation Between Routes

URLs can be looked at as the gateway to our data, and carry a lot of information that we want to use as context so that the user can return to a particular resource or application state. One way to achieve this is through the use of URL parameters that include important data right in the URL of the route that gets matched in React Router v4.

Use URL Parameters with React Router v4

react-router provides two props for setting a specific style on a Link component whose path matches our current route.  activeStyle allows for an inline style while activeClassName allows for an class defined in an external stylesheet.

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