Learn Immutable, Karma 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

Immutable.js provides many Persistent Immutable data structures including: List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record.

immutable

There are lots of techniques for accessing data kept in your Lists. In this lesson, we will compare how data stored in collections can be accessed directly in both standard Arrays and ImmutableJS Lists. We will also look at how to find data inside an Immutable List using the `findEntry` and `findIndex` methods.

Get items in an ImmutableJS List

The reduce function in ImmutableJS allows you to transform and create new data from an existing data structure. In this example, we will do some math and calculate a sum based on data in an ImmutableJS Map.

Calculate a sum using reduce in ImmutableJS

Karma is essentially a tool which spawns a web server that executes source code against test code for each of the browsers connected.

karma

A quick tutorial covering installing Karma and running tests from the command line and Webstorm.

Introduction to Karma

The key to being productive with Immutable JS is understanding how to update values that are nested. Using `setIn` you can place a new value directly into an existing or new path. If you need access to the previous value before setting the new one, you can use `updateIn` instead. `updateIn`  accepts the same path lookups as `setIn`, but gives you a callback function instead so that you can use the previous value however you wish and return an updated version.

Updating nested values with ImmutableJS

ImmutableJS reduce functions can be nested to get data out of complex data structures. In this example, we will create an Immutable List from an Immutable Map that is nested inside of an Immutable List that is itself nested inside of an Immutable Map.

Create a list with nested reduce functions in ImmutableJS

By utilizing immutable data structures, we can write code that is easier to reason about, avoid mutation-related bugs, reduce complexity, and even gain some performance benefits along the way.

Before diving too far into Facebook's [Immutable.js](https://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/) library, let's take a moment to examine some of the pains and obstacles that mutable data structures present. 

We'll take a brief glimpse at putting the Immutable "List" data structure to work by example. We will convert our usage of Javascript's native `Array` to use [Immutable.List](https://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/docs/#/List) in order to address a mutation-related "bug" caused by multiple objects "sharing" a mutable structure (array) by reference.

Immutable.js: Introduction - Easing the Pains of Mutability

In this lesson we'll look at some of the differences between standard JavaScript Arrays and Immutable Lists. We'll create Immutable.JS Lists from scratch, as well as by converting regular Arrays. We will also compare and contrast the `push` and `concat` methods between both types of collection.

Create an immutable List using Immutable.js

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.

Set a value to a Svelte 3 store

It's important to avoid memory leaks, and Svelte 3 is no exception. When we're using the `subscribe` method from Svelte store in a component, it's important to clean ofter ourselves (especially if we're going to instantiate and destroy this component many times over).

In this lesson we're going to learn how to use `unsubscribe` to stop subscribing to the store change in a component's `onDestroy` call, as well how to use auto-subscriptions to refer to the store value and let Svelte take care of cleaning after us to avoid memory leaks.