Learn Immutable, Radium and React-storybook

im·mu·ta·ble i(m)ˈmyo͞odəb(ə)l/ adjective - **unchanging over time or unable to be changed**.

Mutating data is the source of never ending headaches in software systems, and JavaScript code is no exception. Immutable data structures, pure functions, uni-directional data flow... you've probably been hearing these terms.

Immutable.js provides us the data structures and utilities that we need to start introducing this powerful concept of immutability into our applications.

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

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Learn how to use Immutable.js

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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Storybook is a UI component development environment for React, Vue, and Angular. With that, you can develop UI components without running your app.

Here I show how best to configure a React Storybook to use [Typescript](/q/typescript) (with TSX). This lets you write your reusable components with maximal type safety. Please see the provided code for the full source.

Configure React Storybook for use with Typescript

Sometimes our update logic is asynchronous. In this lesson we will investigate two ways in which we can write asynchronous update logic. 

…But, we will also discuss why asynchronous producers should be avoided, and how that can be done by better separating our logic. 

This lesson also demonstrates the “createDraft” and “finishDraft” APIs

Write Asynchronous Producers in Immer and Why You Shouldn’t

In this lesson we will send patches over a WebSocket to our server, and distribute them again from there.

Create a Simple WebSocket Server to Distribute Patches from Immer

[Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/) is a framework that allows you to develop components in isolation. It is ideal for a variety of use cases, most commonly when you're building some shared component toolkit. As such, Nx comes with a dedicated package `@nrwl/storybook` that adds a series of useful code generators to add storybook to an existing React library, but also to automatically generate stories and more.

Use Storybook to Develop React Components in Nx

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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[Nx](https://nx.dev) combines a lot of the best tools on the market, integrates them, and provides tooling to provide the best possible developer experience. One such pair is [Cypress](https://www.cypress.io/) and [Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/). Storybook allows developing components in isolation, which is also a great basis for testing components, which is where Cypress shines.
In this lesson, we're exploring some of the `@nrwl/storybook` code generation utilities that allow you to not only configure Storybook for a React application but automatically also set up a Cypress test configuration for it along with some spec files generated from the Storybook stories.

Use Cypress and Storybook to test your React Components in Isolation

Immutable.js offers methods to break  immutable structures into subsets much like Array--for instance it has the all powerful slice()--and unlike Array it offers functional methods like take() and skip(). You get the best of both the imperative and functional worlds.

Working with Subsets of an Immutable.js Map()

Equality checking deeply nested objects is painful. Fortunately Immutable.js makes this task easy with its .is() and .isSubset() methods. Let's see how we can take two different Immutable Maps() and check for equality.

Equality Checking with .is() and More

Immutable.js offers the fromJS() method to build immutable structures from objects and array. Objects are converted into maps. Arrays are converted into lists. The fromJS() method can also take a reviver function for custom conversions.

Using fromJS() to Convert Plain JavaScript Objects into Immutable Data

Understanding Immutable.js's Map() and List() structures will likely take you as far as you want to go with immutable programming. They have only small semantic differences between each other and the remaining structures in the Immutable.js family. Sequence, however, has one major difference: it's lazy--which opens a new realm of functional possibilities. Let's write a simple sequence to start.

Exploring Sequences and Range() in Immutable.js

Immutable.js iterables offer the reduce() method, a powerful and often misunderstood functional operator on which map(), filter(), groupBy(), etc. are built. The concept is simple: reduce transforms your iterable into something else, that's all. The name is misleading as you may or may not actually "reduce" anything. Let's replicate the groupBy() and filter() methods with reduce to illustrate how it works.

Transforming Immutable Data with Reduce

While Immutable.js offers .is() to confirm value equality between iterables it comes at the cost of referencing each key and value in both objects. For lightning fast equality checks, Immutable.js can produce a hash code based on an iterable's content. If two iterables have the same content, their hash codes will be the same. It's worth noting that this technique is unsuitable for mission critical application development since there is a chance, however slight, that checksums like these might collide. This is outlined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_(computer_science)

Lightning Fast Immutable.js Equality Checks with Hash Codes

The Immutable.js Record() allows you to model your immutable data much like you would model data with native Javascript classes or objects. It differs from native classes because it cannot be mutated after it's creation and it *always* has a default value. It's an excellent construct in which to piece together your stores, be them Flux or some other storage implementation. Let's quickly create an Immutable Record().

Immutable.Record() as data models

In this lesson, we show how to setup React Storybook into an existing React project. We’ll go through common configuration files and how to adjust them.

Add React Storybook to a Project 

Components trigger actions via function props to notify of events that occur within the Component. We can inspect those events using React Storybook.

Inspect Component Events with React Storybook

Immutable.js's Map doesn't promise iteration order after a set() operation. When we need a guarantee for iteration order, we can use OrderedMap. This comes at a slight performance cost, or for you computer science people, it is amortized at an unstable O(log32 N). Let's explore ordering. 

Maintaining Order in Immutable.js Objects

In a CSS library like Bootstrap we can set a button's style to be "primary" or "secondary" by appending classes. For React components we want to be able to do this via props. Radium enables this by composing styles via an array. This mimicks the cascade of CSS.  

Radium: Updating Button Styles via Props

Learn how Immutable.js data structures are different from native iterable Javascript data types and why they provide an excellent foundation on which to build your application's state.

Manage Application State with Immutable.js

Immutable.js provides several methods to iterate over an Immutable.Map(). These also apply to the other immutable structures found within the Immutable.js family, such as Set and List. The primary methods are map and forEach, but we will also cover filter and groupBy.

Iterating Over an Immutable.js Map()

Learn how to query an Immutable.Map() using get, getIn, has, includes, find, first and last. These are powerful operators that make finding data in an object graph pain free. 

Querying an Immutable.js Map()

React's inline styles allow components to stand on their own by not requiring any external CSS. However HTML's style attributes don't support pseudo selectors like `:hover` and `:active`. By using Radium to listen to mouse events we can restore `:hover` and `:active` selectors to inline styles.

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