Spencer Dixon SpencerCDixon

Hi Nicholas,

I saw you tweet about JSX yesterday. It seemed like the discussion devolved pretty quickly but I wanted to share our experience over the last year. I understand your concerns. I've made similar remarks about JSX. When we started using it Planning Center, I led the charge to write React without it. I don't imagine I'd have much to say that you haven't considered but, if it's helpful, here's a pattern that changed my opinion:

The idea that "React is the V in MVC" is disingenuous. It's a good pitch but, for many of us, it feels like in invitation to repeat our history of coupled views. In practice, React is the V and the C. Dan Abramov describes the division as Smart and Dumb Components. At our office, we call them stateless and container components (view-controllers if we're Flux). The idea is pretty simple: components can't

RailsConf 2015 Schedule

RailsConf 2015 Room 202 Day 1

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

Pry Cheat Sheet

Youtube Tutorial 2013

Command Line

pry -r ./config/app_init_file.rb - load your app into a pry session (look at the file loaded by config.ru)
pry -r ./config/environment.rb - load your rails into a pry session

Debugger

My issues with Modules

In researching topics for RailsCasts I often read code in Rails and other gems. This is a great exercise to do. Not only will you pick up some coding tips, but it can help you better understand what makes code readable.

A common practice to organize code in gems is to divide it into modules. When this is done extensively I find it becomes very difficult to read. Before I explain further, a quick detour on instance_eval.

You can find instance_eval used in many DSLs: from routes to state machines. Here's an example from Thinking Sphinx.

class Article &lt; ActiveRecord::Base

This article has been given a more permanent home on my blog. Also, since it was first written, the development of the Promises/A+ specification has made the original emphasis on Promises/A seem somewhat outdated.

You're Missing the Point of Promises

Promises are a software abstraction that makes working with asynchronous operations much more pleasant. In the most basic definition, your code will move from continuation-passing style:

getTweetsFor("domenic", function (err, results) {
 // the rest of your code goes here.

Step 0:

Get Homebrew installed on your mac if you don't already have it

Step 1:

Install highlight. "brew install highlight". (This brings down Lua and Boost as well)

	{
	"env": {
	"browser": true,
	"node": true,
	"es6": true
	},

	"plugins": ["react"],

	"ecmaFeatures": {

	var parser = document.createElement('a');
	parser.href = "http://example.com:3000/pathname/?search=test#hash";

	parser.protocol; // => "http:"
	parser.hostname; // => "example.com"
	parser.port; // => "3000"
	parser.pathname; // => "/pathname/"
	parser.search; // => "?search=test"
	parser.hash; // => "#hash"
	parser.host; // => "example.com:3000"

	[
	{name: 'Afghanistan', code: 'AF'},
	{name: 'Åland Islands', code: 'AX'},
	{name: 'Albania', code: 'AL'},
	{name: 'Algeria', code: 'DZ'},
	{name: 'American Samoa', code: 'AS'},
	{name: 'AndorrA', code: 'AD'},
	{name: 'Angola', code: 'AO'},
	{name: 'Anguilla', code: 'AI'},
	{name: 'Antarctica', code: 'AQ'},