Learn Eslint, Flux and Redwoodjs

RedwoodJS takes the JAMstack philosophy to the next level. It brings together all the tools modern web development has to offer:

- React
- GraphQL
- Prisma

RedwoodJS abstracts database management away from you so that you can just build your schema and it will do all the plumbing. This collection will go over how to create a RedwoodJS project and the scripts that will help make your developer experience a joy.


Bringing full-stack to the JAMstack

Do you love the JAMstack philosophy but need a database-backed web app? Want great developer experience and easy scaling? Redwood is here! Built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma, Redwood works with the components and development workflow you love, but with simple conventions and helpers to make your experience even better.

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Introduction to RedwoodJS: full-stack framework for JAMstack

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

Our first layer of defense when building accessible React applications is to add some auditing tools to our development workflow. This should include adding static analysis checking for common accessibility standards and best practices. We can get this with the latest eslint plugin: "eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y". If you are already linting your projects adding this plugin should fit very smoothly into your workflow.

## Resources
1. [List of all the rules supported by eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y](https://github.com/evcohen/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y#supported-rules)
2. [Comparison of the difference in rules between recommended and strict mode](https://github.com/evcohen/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y#difference-between-recommended-and-strict-mode)
3. [Background on how the Accessibility API implemented by browsers interfaces with Assistive Technologies](https://github.com/evcohen/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y#some-background-on-wai-aria-the-ax-tree-and-browsers)

Set up ESLint to Audit Accessibility Issues in React

The pluggable linting utility for JavaScript and JSX.

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We have a number of options to use when testing for accessibility issues concerning alternative text for images.  The react-axe library and axe browser extension will both report when an image is missing alternative text.  The tota11y browser extension will annotate any images that are missing alternative text.  Running eslint with the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y plugin installed will report on any `<img>` elements missing an `alt` attribute.  Finally, we can use a screen reader to actually hear what is read when an image has focus.

Test for Image Alternative Text Accessibility Issues

Images must have text alternatives that describe the information or function 
represented by them so they can be read and understood by those using screen readers.

## Alternative text for images
* All `<img>` elements should have an `alt` attribute provided
    * When not provided many screen readers will fallback to reading the file name instead
* The `alt` value should not include words like _“image”_, _“picture”_ or _“icon”_
    * Screen readers are already announcing that the element is an image
* Images that are decorative only and provide no information or function to the page should be hidden from Assistive Technologies by providing an empty `alt` attribute (`alt=””`)

## References
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/tips/
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/informative/
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/functional/
* https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/textual/

Define Images with Appropriate Text Alternatives

Our accessibility auditing toolkit makes it very easy for us to test for any form controls that are missing labels or are not correctly associated with their labels.  Running Eslint with the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y installed will show us any form controls with missing or unassociated labels.  Running react-axe or using axe to audit a web page will similarly list any of these findings.  Finally using tota11y we can annotate any form controls on a page that are missing labels.  This is definitely some of the lower hanging fruit that we can easily find and fix when making our applications accessible!

Test for Form Control Label Accessibility Issues

Labeling inputs, elements, and widgets add context and clarity for assistive technology such as screen readers.  Elements of a `<form>` such as `<input>` or `<textarea>` or `<select>` should be labelled by using a `<label>` element.  Placeholder text can be used in addition to a label but should not be used in place of a label as not all assistive technologies respect placeholder text.

Ensure Form Controls have Accessible Labels

We use `yarn redwood generate page` (`yarn rw` for short) in this lesson to generate an `IndexPage` component. 

The first argument to `yarn rw generate page` is the name of the page you are generating. The second argument is the path you want the page to show up on. So `yarn rw generate page index /` will generate an `IndexPage` component and insert a route entry in our `web/src/Routes.js` file.

We learn that redwood import `React` for you so you don't have to import it manually when you are creating a component.

Generate a Page Using the Redwood CLI

In this lesson, we are going over how to generate a `RedwoodJS` project.

We can create a `RedwoodJS` project with `yarn create redwood-app ./my-redwood-project`.

`yarn` will generate the `RedwoodJS` app in the file folder you specified without installing any globals.

To run the `RedwoodJS` app, we use `yarn redwood dev`. This runs the Redwood client as well as the `GraphQL` backend.

Generate a Redwood Project

RedwoodJS provides a `Link` component that we can use to navigate around our app. We can provide a `to` prop with the path that we want to navigate to.

RedwoodJS takes this a step further and provides a `routes` object from `@redwoodjs/router`. This object is aware of all the routes defined in `web/Routes.js`. This allows us to use the methods on this object rather than referencing the our routes with a string literal. We can then change the route path without having to change all of the references to that route all over our app.

Use RedwoodJS Link and routes Object to Navigate

RedwoodJS gives us a cli command to generate layouts.

`yarn redwood generate layout main`

This will generate a `MainLayout` component in `src/layouts/MainLayout/`. We can use this layout component to define any headers or footers we want to share across multiple pages. 

Extract a RedwoodJS Layout Component

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

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In this lesson you will learn how to use the eslint yeoman generator to scaffold a new plugin to provide custom rules for your project. 
You will also be able to check the basic skeleton for an eslint ruleand a working example rule to apply a naming convention for async functions.

Scaffold an eslint Plugin with Yeoman

Nx already comes with a default TypeScript setup. Although you can opt-out of that and generate plain JS based components, especially in a large setup TypeScript can be beneficial in uncovering potential issues early. To add an extra level, Nx also comes with preconfigured eslint for all the apps and libraries. In this lesson we're going to explore the lint setup and how it can be used.

Linting a React app with Nx

Actions contain no functionality, but rather describe an event in our application.  In this lesson we will describe our Actions as they relate to our application.  These Actions will then be available for triggering in our Views and for execution in our Store.

React Flux: Actions

In Flux our Components are referred to as Views, but they are the same familiar Components associated with any React development.  In Flux, however, we have the benefit of the architecture to keep us from having to pass down through a long chain of children Components any functionality that may be embedded in our Stores.  In this Lesson we will wire up all of our Components in record time utilizing the architecture we've already established.

React Flux: Components/Views

Stores are where the real work in our application is done.  Dispatchers broadcast Actions to all Stores, and the Stores registered to listen for those Actions will perform any logic needed to update our Views.  In this lesson we will establish our first Store and register the Actions we wish to respond to.

React Flux: Stores

Our build process during this series will utilize both gulp and browserify.  In this lesson we will take a moment to setup our environment and all of the tooling required to begin developing our Flux Application.  We've kept the build process very simple so porting it to grunt should be a breeze, but this also serves as a simple primer for those who may not be familiar with gulp.

React Flux: Development Environment Setup

Organizing modules and components is a critical aspect of the development of any single-page web application (SPA). In this lesson we will look at refactoring the Flux React store into a more module structure.

React Flux: Project Organization

Flux has four major components: Stores, Dispatchers, Views, and Actions.  These components interact less like a typical MVC and more like an Event Bus.  In this lesson we will start by creating our Dispatcher which queues up our Actions as Promises and executes them as they are received.  We'll also create an AppDispatcher which, unlike the Dispatcher, is more specific to our application.

React Flux: Overview and Dispatchers

As your React Flux application grows, it is inevitable that you start to see functionality and code repeated. With React, you can easily keep things DRY by using mixins.

React Flux: Remove Duplicate Code with Mixins

With this lesson, we will bring it all together, using what we've learned in the series to fisnish out the React Flux architecture example.

The completed code for this series can be found [here on Github](https://github.com/eggheadio/egghead-react-flux-example).

React Flux: Wrapping Up

By default, React doesn't have built in routing. We will add routing to our application with the react-routing-component.

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