Learn Electron, Jasmine and Mobx

Developing logic-rich applications is a key skill to have.

The TypeScript–React combination helps you unlock that skill, and it’s a great developer experience in terms of writing understandable and refactorable HTML. But the default state management for React has a long way to go to feel simple and maintainable — and that’s where MobX makes your life so much easier. MobX keeps things simple without using complicated setups like `provider` and `connect` that provide way too little value for all the mental overhead. 

In this course, you’ll see how to model your React application logic using simple JavaScript classes — and with the help of MobX, make those classes the beating heart of your React applications. You’ll learn:

- that you don't need advanced annotations and TypeScript features to use MobX
- how to easily refactor code through TypeScript
- how to use TypeScript to track the flow of state as properties change

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.

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Develop React Applications with Mobx and TypeScript

MobX State Tree (MST) is a library that helps you organize your application states in a very structured manner. It allows you to create a component model, but for your data!

Course instructor Michel Weststrate—creator of Mobx—will teach you to model application state after your problem domain with MST. You will get hands-on practice and see how MST lets you solve problems with its out-of-the-box support for asynchronous actions, patches, snapshots, and middleware.

Over the 17 lessons, you’ll build a little bookshop application using React, MST, and create-react-app, while learning how to manage the lifecycle of your data by describing data models. 

Join Michel in one of the most popular courses on egghead!

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree

Electron is a framework that makes it easy to create cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Electron and open-source tools give you everything you need to create a compelling desktop app--native user interface elements like menus and dialogs, installers, auto-updates, and more. 

This course will teach you the core concepts of Electron so that you can leverage it to create your own desktop application for macOS and Windows. 

We'll go over:
- Creating user interfaces in Electron (both HTML based and native)
- Understanding Electron's multi-process architecture 
- Shipping your app to users

Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

electron

Build a desktop application with Electron

MobX is designed to enable building web applications with a complex data model in an intuitive and very performant manner. Using React and MobX is currently the simplest way to build component based web applications.

"Half the code, twice the fun" is how people describe MobX, or "So simple, I cannot believe it just works". 



Manage Complex State in React Apps with MobX

Applications are driven by state. Many things, like the user interface, should always be consistent with that state.
[MobX](https://mobxjs.github.io/mobx) is a general purpose FRP library that provides the means to derive, for example, a React based user interface automatically from the state and keep it synchronized.

The net result of this approach is that writing applications becomes really straight-forward and boilerplate free.

Sync the UI with the app state using MobX observable and observer in React

This lesson explains how you can build larger trees of react component and how they are managed efficiently by MobX. You will learn how to pass observable data structures around in props and how the Devtools can be used to analyze the performance of your UI.

Pass observable data through props in MobX

This lesson explains how actions can be used to control and modify the state of your application. They help you to structure your code base and integrate well with the MobX React Devtools. Actions automatically create transactions, which group changes together.

Use MobX actions to change and guard state

Derivations form the backbone of MobX and come in two flavors: computed values are values that can be derived from the state automatically. And reactions can be used to manage side effects, such as drawing the user interface. In this lesson you will learn how these concepts relate to each other and how they are optimized automatically by MobX.

Derive computed values and manage side effects with MobX reactions

In this lesson we will finally do something useful with our temperatures. We extend it into a small app in which users can enter a location, which is used as input for an external API to fetch weather data. In the mean time MobX keeps our UI in sync with the current state of the request.

Handle user input and asynchronous actions with MobX

Passing down stores through each layer of components can be a tedious job. This lesson demonstrates how Provider can be used to automatically connect observer based components to stores, by leveraging React's context mechanism in the background.

Connect MobX observer components to the store with the React Provider

So far we have been talking briefly about reactions. In this lesson you will learn how reactions can be used to observe state until some condition is met. After that you will see how autorun can be used to automatically trigger side effects. This is used internally by observer as well. We will test this by replacing React with our own handcrafted rendering which is still kept in sync with the state by MobX!

Write custom MobX reactions with when and autorun

So far we have used the observable decorator extensively. Let's take a closer look on what it does and see how the extendObservable and observable functions can be used to create observable objects, arrays and maps.

Use observable objects, arrays, and maps to store state in MobX

The MobX React devtools can be used to analyze when and why React components are re-rendered. They offer three features: 1) visualize when components re-render, 2) show the dependency tree of a component, to see which data it's rendering depends upon, and 3) log in detail which data is changed by your actions, and how these changes propagate through the application.

Analyze React components with MobX-React devtools

In this lesson we’ll load javascript into the BrowserWindow and display the Electron version on the page. Loading javascript into Electron is almost exactly the same as loading it into the browser, however it is a best practice to use the `require` syntax.

Load JavaScript in an Electron BrowserWindow

A main menu is a hallmark of native desktop applications. Electron makes it easy to create native menus and menu items in JavaScript.

We’ll go over creating a menu template using `Menu.buildFromTemplate` and then setting it as the main application menu via `Menu.setApplicationMenu`. 

Create a native desktop system menu with the Electron Menu module

In this lesson we'll learn about `dialog.showMessageBox` . This is the most basic Electron dialog but it offers lots of customization options, such as `type`, `icon`, `title`, and `buttons`. Some of these options vary by platform, so we'll also look at how things differ between Windows and Mac. 

Display native desktop dialog windows with Electron

In this video, we'll learn how to save and open a file using native dialogs in Electron. First, we'll use `dialog.showSaveDialog` to display a native save dialog and use `dialog.showErrorBox` to display an error message if the save failed. Then, we'll open the file we saved using `dialog.showOpenDialog`. Finally, we'll look at how these dialogs look on Windows vs Mac.

Save/Open a file with an Electron dialog window

Dealing with multiple processes in an application is new for many JavaScript developers. We’ll go over what exactly a process is and what the primary responsibilities of the main and renderer processes are. The main process is primarily responsible for creating native UI elements and managing the application lifecycle, while the renderer process runs the HTML based UI. Accordingly, different APIs are available in each process. 

Understand Electron’s main and renderer process architecture

In Electron, we often need to coordinate actions between multiple processes. For example, if a user clicks a button in a renderer process that makes a new `browserWindow` open, we need to be able to send a message to the main process that triggers this action. We’ll look at how to do just that using the `ipcRenderer` and `ipcMain` modules.

Communicate between Electron processes using IPC

`remote` allows you to seamlessly interact with main process modules as if they were in the renderer process. It’s a super useful abstraction over IPC. We’ll learn how to use it and how to avoid some potential gotchas it has. 

[Devtron](https://electron.atom.io/devtron/) is a devtools extension that the Electron team has made. We’ll be using it to view all of the IPC that happens in our application. In this lesson we’ll learn how to include and use it in our code. 

Communicate between Electron processes using the remote module

Every Electron application needs a custom icon. Mac needs an `icns` file and Windows needs an `ico` file. We'll learn how to use a npm module, `electron-icon-maker`, that takes a 1024x1024 PNG and then outputs all the files we need. 

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