Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By : Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk
Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By: Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk

Overview of this book

Over the years, React and React Native has proven itself among JavaScript developers as a popular choice for a complete and practical guide to the React ecosystem. This fourth edition comes with the latest features, enhancements, and fixes to align with React 18, while also being compatible with React Native. It includes new chapters covering critical features and concepts in modern cross-platform app development with React. From the basics of React to popular components such as Hooks, GraphQL, and NativeBase, this definitive guide will help you become a professional React developer in a step-by-step manner. You'll begin by learning about the essential building blocks of React components. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with higher-level functionalities in application development and then put your knowledge to work by developing user interface components for the web and native platforms. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn how to bring your application together with robust data architecture. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build React applications for the web and React Native applications for multiple mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (36 chapters)
1
Part 1 – React
15
Part 2 – React Native
31
Part 3 – React Architecture

What is isomorphic JavaScript?

Another term for server-side rendering is isomorphic JavaScript. This is a fancy way of saying JavaScript code that can run in the browser and in Node.js without modification. In this section, you'll learn the basic concepts of isomorphic JavaScript before diving into the code.

The server is a render target

The beauty of React is that it's a small abstraction layer that sits on top of a rendering target. So far, the target has been the browser, but it can also be the server. The render target can be anything, just as long as the correct translation calls are implemented behind the scenes.

In the case of rendering on the server, components are rendered to strings. The server can't actually display rendered HTML; all it can do is send the rendered markup to the browser. This idea is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 11.1 – A conceptual model of server-side rendering

It's possible to render...