Learn Mobx, Nvda and Redwoodjs

Developing logic-rich applications is a key skill to have.

The TypeScript–React combination helps you unlock that skill, and it’s a great developer experience in terms of writing understandable and refactorable HTML. But the default state management for React has a long way to go to feel simple and maintainable — and that’s where MobX makes your life so much easier. MobX keeps things simple without using complicated setups like `provider` and `connect` that provide way too little value for all the mental overhead. 

In this course, you’ll see how to model your React application logic using simple JavaScript classes — and with the help of MobX, make those classes the beating heart of your React applications. You’ll learn:

- that you don't need advanced annotations and TypeScript features to use MobX
- how to easily refactor code through TypeScript
- how to use TypeScript to track the flow of state as properties change

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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Develop React Applications with Mobx and TypeScript

MobX State Tree (MST) is a library that helps you organize your application states in a very structured manner. It allows you to create a component model, but for your data!

Course instructor Michel Weststrate—creator of Mobx—will teach you to model application state after your problem domain with MST. You will get hands-on practice and see how MST lets you solve problems with its out-of-the-box support for asynchronous actions, patches, snapshots, and middleware.

Over the 17 lessons, you’ll build a little bookshop application using React, MST, and create-react-app, while learning how to manage the lifecycle of your data by describing data models. 

Join Michel in one of the most popular courses on egghead!

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree

MobX is designed to enable building web applications with a complex data model in an intuitive and very performant manner. Using React and MobX is currently the simplest way to build component based web applications.

"Half the code, twice the fun" is how people describe MobX, or "So simple, I cannot believe it just works". 



Manage Complex State in React Apps with MobX

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

Since MST offers a runtime type system, it can create and compose types on the fly, making it possible to reuse logic in new and powerful ways.

In this lesson you will learn:
* That MST types are immutable and composed together behind the scenes
* How to compose types explicitly by using `types.compose`
* How to create dynamic, parameterized types by leveraging that MST types are first class javascript citizens

Create Dynamic Types and use Type Composition to Extract Common Functionality

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

Applications are driven by state. Many things, like the user interface, should always be consistent with that state.
[MobX](https://mobxjs.github.io/mobx) is a general purpose FRP library that provides the means to derive, for example, a React based user interface automatically from the state and keep it synchronized.

The net result of this approach is that writing applications becomes really straight-forward and boilerplate free.

Sync the UI with the app state using MobX observable and observer in React

This lesson explains how you can build larger trees of react component and how they are managed efficiently by MobX. You will learn how to pass observable data structures around in props and how the Devtools can be used to analyze the performance of your UI.

Pass observable data through props in MobX

This lesson explains how actions can be used to control and modify the state of your application. They help you to structure your code base and integrate well with the MobX React Devtools. Actions automatically create transactions, which group changes together.

Use MobX actions to change and guard state

Derivations form the backbone of MobX and come in two flavors: computed values are values that can be derived from the state automatically. And reactions can be used to manage side effects, such as drawing the user interface. In this lesson you will learn how these concepts relate to each other and how they are optimized automatically by MobX.

Derive computed values and manage side effects with MobX reactions

In this lesson we will finally do something useful with our temperatures. We extend it into a small app in which users can enter a location, which is used as input for an external API to fetch weather data. In the mean time MobX keeps our UI in sync with the current state of the request.

Handle user input and asynchronous actions with MobX

Passing down stores through each layer of components can be a tedious job. This lesson demonstrates how Provider can be used to automatically connect observer based components to stores, by leveraging React's context mechanism in the background.

Connect MobX observer components to the store with the React Provider

So far we have been talking briefly about reactions. In this lesson you will learn how reactions can be used to observe state until some condition is met. After that you will see how autorun can be used to automatically trigger side effects. This is used internally by observer as well. We will test this by replacing React with our own handcrafted rendering which is still kept in sync with the state by MobX!

Write custom MobX reactions with when and autorun

So far we have used the observable decorator extensively. Let's take a closer look on what it does and see how the extendObservable and observable functions can be used to create observable objects, arrays and maps.

Use observable objects, arrays, and maps to store state in MobX

The MobX React devtools can be used to analyze when and why React components are re-rendered. They offer three features: 1) visualize when components re-render, 2) show the dependency tree of a component, to see which data it's rendering depends upon, and 3) log in detail which data is changed by your actions, and how these changes propagate through the application.

Analyze React components with MobX-React devtools

NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) is a free “screen reader” which enables blind and vision impaired people to use computers.

nvda

NVDA is a popular open source screen reader on Windows that works well with Firefox. It's similar to JAWS, another popular Windows screen reader that works best with IE. But NVDA has no licensing fee plus an open bug tracker, making it great for users as well as developer testing. 

In this lesson, you'll learn how to browse a webpage using NVDA's keyboard shortcuts, including headings navigation, skip links, and the Elements List. You'll also learn a bit about Forms Mode and how it impacts screen reader navigation.  For more tips, check out the resources below.

## Resources
- [Using NVDA to Emulate Web Accessibility](http://webaim.org/articles/nvda/)
- [NVDA Keyboard Shortcuts](https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/nvda-keyboard-shortcuts)
- [Understanding Screen Reader Interaction Modes](http://tink.uk/understanding-screen-reader-interaction-modes/)
- [Three Things You Should Know Before Using Voiceover for Testing](http://webaim.org/blog/three-things-voiceover/)

## Installing NVDA
If you're on a Windows machine, you can install [NVDA directly](http://www.nvaccess.org/download/). If you're on a Mac or Linux, you could install a Windows virtual machine:

- [Install VirtualBox](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads)
- [Get a Windows VM from Microsoft](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/) - I use IE11
- [Install Firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/) - install on the VM!
- [Install NVDA](http://www.nvaccess.org/download/)
- [How to Map Your Mac's Capslock Key to a NVDA or JAWS Key in a Windows VM](https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/06/07/how-to-map-your-macs-capslock-key-to-a-nvda-or-jaws-key-in-a-windows-virtual-machine/)

Testing for Accessibility with the NVDA Screen Reader on Windows

In this lesson, we introduce the running example of this course, a wishlist app. We will take a look at the core of mobx-state-tree (MST), models. Models describe the shape of your state and perform type validation. 

You will learn:
* Defining models using types.Model
* Instantiating models from JSON using Model.create
* Primitive types: types.string & types.number
* Type inference for primitive types
* types.array
* types.optional
* Composing models into a model tree
* Testing models using jest

Describe Your Application Domain Using mobx-state-tree(MST) Models

We will expand our UI, and give the user the possibility to edit his wishlist. We will use the earlier defined actions. We also will use model clones only to modify data temporarily, and after approving the changes, apply them back to the original model. 

In this lesson you will learn: 
* How to call model actions from a component
* Using `clone` to create a full, deep clone of any model instance
* Using `applySnapshot` to update the state of a model instance given a snapshot.

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