Learn Browserify, Flux-architecture and Leaflet

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

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: Flux Architecture (ES6)

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

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

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

Flux Architecture: Application Actions

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

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

Building upon the `watch` task that we begin this lesson with, we’ll look at how to create a local development server using the `app` directory as the web root. By using Browsersync to achieve this, we can also instruct all connected browsers to automatically reload each time our bundle is re-generated. Browsersync has a public `.stream()` method that is designed exactly for this purpose.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Live Reload with Browsersync

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

Flux Architecture: Routing with react-router 1.0

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

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

browserify

Let's look at the basics of setting up Gulp and Browserify. Creating a Gulp task from scratch, we'll cover how to utilise the Browserify API to generate a single `bundle.js` file, catch and log any errors that occur in the compilation process, transform the stream into a format that can be consumed by `gulp.dest` and finish by writing the bundle to a `dist` directory.

Gulp and Browserify - Initial Setup

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

Interactive Leaflet Maps with GeoJSON data

Beginning with a single Gulp task capable of generating a one-time Browserify bundle, we enable file-watching and incremental rebuilds by incorporating Watchify. We add a second task `watch` & refactor our initial code to enable the bulk of it to be re-used. We’ll look at exactly how to ‘wire’ these tools together and how the relationship between Watchify & Browserify can manifest into a seriously efficient workflow.

Gulp and Browserify - Hooking up Watchify

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.