Learn Flux-architecture, Microsoft and Nightmare

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 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

React: Flux Architecture (ES6)

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.

microsoft

Learn the various ways to access and enable High Contrast Mode on Windows.

Enable High Contrast Mode on Windows

We should not use color alone as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.  Users may not be able to see/understand the differences in color and require additional indicators.

Along with color, use additional indicators such as:
* typography
* shapes
* grids
* spaces
* and/or allocate more weight to important elements

## References:
* http://www.particletree.com/features/interfaces-and-color-blindness/
* https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/color-contrast-tips-and-tools-for-accessibility/

Use More than Color Alone to Convey Information in a Web Page

Just about every tool in our accessibility auditing toolkit can help us identify any issues with sufficient color contrast ratio on a web page.  The react-axe library and axe browser extension both report findings on all elements with insufficient contrast ratios.  The tota11y browser extension will annotate any elements with their contrast ratios and color those that are insufficient in red.  

Additionally, we need to use our experience tools to see what some of our users out there may we seeing.  We need to test with high contrast browser extensions as well as the display settings in Windows and Mac.  If our users with visual impairments are using these tools we need to see what our application looks like using them because we may find that under a certain mode some things may suddenly be harder to read or virtually invisible.

## Resources
* https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2019/02/12/high-contrast-aria-and-images.html

Test for Insufficient Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

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

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

Flux Architecture: Routing with react-router 1.0

Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library.

The goal is to expose just a few simple methods, and have an API that feels synchronous for each block of scripting, rather than deeply nested callbacks. It's designed for automating tasks across sites that don't have APIs.

nightmare

Many pages you'll want to grab data from will require you to log in first. This video demonstrates how to log in and grab whatever data off the page you will need.

Scraping Data from Sites with Login Forms with Nightmare

Many websites have more than just simple static content. Dynamic content which is rendered by JavaScript requires browser to be able to scrape data. This video demonstrates how to use Nightmare (which is a wrapper around Electron) to launch a url and scrape dynamic data.

Scraping Dynamic JavaScript Websites with Nightmare

For a production Windows server it makes sense to run NodeJS applications as a Windows service.  This way they can be automatically restarted if the server is rebooted.

It also makes it easier to use monitoring tools like datadog to detect if there are issues with the service which is critical for production systems.

Install a Node.js Application as a Windows Service

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

To replicate your production application its helpful when developing a local NodeJS Express application is running under SSL. 

There are some web technologies which do not play nicely with standard http and its likely to become more common e.g. Web Push Notifications.

This lesson will show you how to create a local SSL certificate for localhost and then convert it into a format that will work with Express.  It will also show you how to make sure that Chrome will trust it.

This lesson is for Windows as it uses a powershell command, as well as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
 

Create Local SSL Certificates for an Express App on Windows

Flutter allows you to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.

flutter

We will setup our first command-line Dart application. We will use the Chocolatey package manager to install the SDK and write our first  program. This will form the basis for future lessons.

Get Chocolatey → https://chocolatey.org/docs/installation

Get the gist of commands → https://gist.github.com/creativebracket/128dafcbbfdc1d6946231a931f95cb1b

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