Learn Babel, Stripe and Tweenmax

### Accept payments & sell products powered by Stripe and the best of the JAMStack

There are as many ways to build an e-commerce store on the internet as there are products to sell. One thing is for certain, e-commerce is here to stay and as professional developers we need to understand how to build fully custom stores for our clients using the best modern tools available.

- React: flexible and customizable while following modern best practices
- Next.js: lightening fast with guide rails to help your project perform as consumers expect
- Stripe Checkout: lets you offload reams of complicated business logic to a trusted third party that maintains regulatory compliance, global payments, and a standard UX.

Your store will have well managed local component state using React Hooks and you'll also have clear and cohesive shared (global) state with React Context.

Finally you'll deploy your custom store to Vercel (the platform behind Next.js) as well as how to make your Next.js e-commerce store portable to deploy to other platforms.

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

Create an eCommerce Store with Next.js and Stripe Checkout

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

Payments infrastructure for the internet.

stripe

Stripe has a variety of solutions that makes it super powerful as a payment provider. We're taking advantage of their Stripe Checkout product because it allows us to get started with an online store without having to manually accept payments.

To do this though, Stripe Checkout relies on the browser to make API requests, which we have to configure to work for our website.

We will set our eCommerce site domain on Stripe's CLIENT-ONLY integration to set us up to add the checkout workflow for our site.

Configure a Stripe Checkout Domain for Client-Only Integration

Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.

With Stripe or many other services, their APIs rely on special keys that authenticate requests or allow that service to track usage for things like billing.

Some of these keys are able to be used publicly and some must be kept private, but ultimately we want to have a way to easily manage these keys and not hard-code them into our application, which is where environment variables come in.

We will find our Stripe public key that will be used locally as well as in production on Vercel. You'll learn how to set an environment variable in Next.js (hint, you need to prepend `NEXT_PUBLIC` to the variable name make it available in the client) as well as in production on Vercel.

Add a Stripe API Key as an Environment Variable in Next.js & Vercel

Now that we have an app and our products configure in Stripe, it's time to connect the two and give people a way to purchase our products.

Using Stripe's API, we can initiate a new instance of the Stripe Checkout flow with a simple click of a button.

We'll create an `initiateCheckout` function that handles this flow for us. After loading stripe through `@stripe/stripe-js` we'll `await` a `stripePromise` that will allow us to redirect to stripes checkout flow. You'll notice that we will need to pass in line items with the price id and quantity.

Integrate Stripe Checkout to Purchase Products in Next.js with Stripe @stripe/stripe-js Cl

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

TimelineLite is a piece of the Greensock TweenMax library that provides the ability to create sequenced animation with very little code or setup.

Greensock TimelineLite Animation Sequences

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

[Greensock](http://www.greensock.com/tweenmax/) is a powerful animation library for JavaScript. It's also fully compatible with AngularJS. This lesson will get you started using Greensock with AngularJS to provide rich animations for your users.

Basic Animation with Greensock's TweenMax

React's use of the VirtualDOM can make it confusing on how to get actual elements to use in animation libraries like TweenMax. This video shows how to use this.getDOMNode() and this.refs and hook them in to TweenMax to satisfy all of your advanced animation needs.

Using TweenMax with React

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

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 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

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

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

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

<p>Henry Zhu is currently a steward for Babel, and today he'll be discussing the management and lifestyle side of working on an open source project full-time.</p><p>The financial side to open source is interesting. Henry talks about where he gets his money and how he can be financially independent while still working on open source full time. Most of the money comes from donations through Open Collective and Patreon. A lot of the donations come from users, but corporations do donate as well. Henry also discusses the stability of it, and how the NPR model of asking for donations can lead to uncertainty about the next month.</p><p>Henry says he's enjoying the management and marketing side of being a steward about as much as he enjoys coding. It's a side that people don't often think about with open source. This side of it includes a lot of marketing and interacting with the greater community, as well as the other maintainers and contributors to babel.</p><p>How does Henry handle all this responsibility when there is no one above him telling him when to take a break, or when to go on vacation? Henry and Joel talk about having a positive "selfishness", and taking care of yourself so that the project can prosper. If you want to be doing it for years you have to make sure that you don't burn out.</p><hr /><h3>Transcript</h3><p><a href="https://egghead.simplecast.com/episodes/henry-zhu/transcript">"Henry Zhu, Maintainer of Babel" Transcript</a></p><h3>Resources:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://babeljs.io/">Babel</a></li><li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X">The Power of Habit</a></li><li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-What-Love-Spiritual/dp/158743380X">You Are What You Love</a></li><li><a href="https://www.tinyhabits.com/">Tiny Habits</a></li><li><a href="https://kaidavis.com/articles/">Kai Davis</a></li></ul><h3>Henry Zhu:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad?lang=en">Twitter</a></li><li><a href="https://www.henryzoo.com/">Website</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/hzoo">Github</a></li><li><a href="https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu">Patreon</a></li><li><a href="https://opencollective.com/babel#">Open Collective</a></li></ul><h3>Joel Hooks:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://twitter.com/jhooks">Twitter</a></li><li><a href="https://joelhooks.com/">Website</a></li></ul>


Today, Henry Zhu, the lead maintainer of Babel, discusses what it's like to work on a large and important open source project. Henry gets into how Babel receives funding, how corporations are involved in open source, stewardship of an open source project, mental and physical health, and not compromising his values.  

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