Learn Gulp, Nightmare and Svelte

JavaScript community has been shaken recently by a release of Svelte 3 and for a good reason - it's a completely different approach than React or Vue. To quote the docs:

"[Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app."

**The best part?** If you have 26 spare minutes you can learn the basics of Svelte 3 and start building your own apps with it!

Enjoy!



The magical disappearing UI framework

 - The web's JavaScript bloat crisis, solved. Svelte turns your templates into tiny, framework-less vanilla JavaScript.
 - Simple and familiar. Build apps out of composable, easy-to-write blocks using languages you already know.
 - Super fast, rock solid. Compile-time static analysis ensures the browser does no more work than it needs to.

svelte

Up and running with Svelte 3

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

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

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

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

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

A brief introduction to using GulpJS in your JavaScript application and creating your first Gulp task.

Installing and Writing a Default Task with Gulp

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

We will look at bundling your JavaScript files using Gulp, Gulp-Concat, and Gulp-Uglify

Bundling Your JavaScript Files with Gulp

In this lesson you will learn how to attach Event Handlers to buttons and input fields. Event handlers normally follows the `on:[event]` format. If you are making use of two way binding you should use `bind:` instead, for example an input field could use bind:value.

Use Event Handlers in Svelte 2

Svelte is a new approach to building user interfaces. 

Instead of doing the vast majority of work at the runtime as other frameworks do, Svelte shifts that work into the _compile_ step which happens when you build your app. As such, you're shipping heavily optimized code to your users.

In this quick lesson we are going to learn how to create a brand new project with Svelte 3 from scratch.

Create a new project with Svelte 3

In most Web applications we want to be able to render different HTML markup depending on values passed in from JavaScript code.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to render JavaScript variable in HTML markup when using Svelte 3.

Add data to HTML markup using Svelte 3

In Svelte 3, the same as in regular HTML we can add CSS styles to a component and this is what we're going to learn in this lesson.

Important note - styles are _scoped to the component_ which means that if we style a `h1` tag in component A, it won't automatically affect `h1` tags in component B.

Add styles to Svelte 3 component

It's highly unlikely that we'd like to have an entire app in a single file. Instead, what we'd like to do is to spread our code across multiple components and render them in one another.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to create a `<Surname />` Svelte 3 component which we're going to use in our main `App.svelte` file to display a user's surname.

Create a new Svelte 3 component to render it inside of another component

One of the key advantages of having a component system is the ability to render the component differently based on what kind of properties (shortened to 'props' in Svelte) were passed in to the component.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to declare properties inside of a Svelte component and how to pass in data to be rendered inside of a `<UserInfo />` component. We're also going to learn how to use default props which are used if a value for a property was not passed in.

Declare and pass in properties to a Svelte 3 component

Svelte automatically updates the DOM when your component's state changes. Often, some parts of a component's state need to be computed from other parts. This is where _reactive declarations_ come in.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to use reactive declarations to re-compute (and render) square of a counter value in a simple counter example whenever user clicks on a button.

Use reactive declarations to compute component state in Svelte 3

Quite often we need to be able to loop over and render a list of data that (for example) is returned from the backend. 

In this lesson we are going to learn how to use `each` block from Svelte to iterate over a list of data and render a list of European cities. We're also going to learn how to get the current `index` while iterating over a list, as well as how to destructure a currently iterated over element of the array.

Loop over and render a list of data using an `each` block in Svelte 3

The whole magic of webapps is that users can interact with our code via various DOM events and Svelte is no exception in that regard.

In this quick lesson we're going to learn how to use DOM events in Svelte 3 as well as how to use event _modifiers_ to alter DOM event behaviour (such as `once` and `preventDefault`)

Use DOM events and event modifiers in Svelte 3

Every Svelte component has a lifecycle that starts when it is created, and ends when it is destroyed. There are a handful of functions that allow you to run code at key moments during that lifecycle.

The one you'll use most frequently is `onMount`, which runs after the component is first rendered to the DOM. 

In this lesson we're going to learn how to use `onMount` to fetch and render data from Star Wars API.

Use an onMount lifecycle method to fetch and render data in Svelte 3

Not all application state belongs inside your application's component hierarchy. Sometimes, you'll have values that need to be accessed by multiple unrelated components, or by a regular JavaScript module.

In Svelte, we do this with _stores_. In this lesson we're going to learn how to create a `writable` store and how to use it to allow `Incrementer` and `Decrementer` components modify the value of the store

Use Svelte 3 stores to share data between multiple unrelated components

Sometimes we don't want to have a complicated `update` function to change a value of our store. We know exactly what we want to change the value to - we can just use the `store.set` function to do that.

In this lesson we're going to learn how to set a value to a Svelte 3 store by using the `store.set` function to set the value of a counter without having to increment/decrement it one by one.