Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned that I’ve been learning React JS.  First in the article “Reaction to React JS and Associated Bits” and then last week in my article “Test Driven Learning”. 

In the first article, I mentioned that if you use React JS, you’ll probably end up using the Flux design pattern and since there are multiple ways of implementing flux, getting a clear definition of what it is and how it should work can be confusing.  At least, I found it confusing.

And now that I’ve figured it out, I thought it might be helpful both to myself and to the programming community at large if I offered my own Explanation of the Flux Pattern.  At the very least, it will give me one more way of solidifying the concept in my own brain.  Maybe it will be helpful to you as well.

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As I mentioned last week, I’ve been learning React JS over the last month or so. Up until the start of this project, I would learn a new framework, and then I would try to paste in Test Driven Development after the fact.  I would use the excuse that because I didn’t know the framework well enough, I wouldn’t be able to properly write tests for it.

But this time, I decided to do something different.  What if I wrote tests for my demo application as I was learning this new framework?  My reasoning was that learning how to test code written in the framework was just as important as learning the framework.

What follows are the lessons I learned from this wildly successful experiment.

Photo credit: twm1340 via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA

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I’ve been learning React JS over the last several weeks.  Currently, I now know 4 of the major JavaScript frameworks: Angular 1, Angular 2, EXTjs (4.2 – 6.0.1), and now React JS.  To be clear, I also know Knockout and JQuery.  But I don’t consider these frameworks so much as libraries.  They’ve helped me understand the principles used in the frameworks, but they are not frameworks.  What follows is a summary of what I consider React’s strengths and weaknesses.

Photo credit: kristin osier via VisualHunt / CC BY

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Last week as I was discussing the basics of JavaScript Objects, I kept referring to the members of the object as “fields.”  Never did I call them properties or methods.  This is because all members that are hanging off of an object are treated the same, from a membership perspective.  It is the type of data it contains that makes it behave as what we would normally refer to as a property or a method.

This is an important distinction.

In a strongly typed system, we can say that a member of our object is a property or method simply because it was defined as one or the other when we defined our class. In JavaScript we have neither classes where we can define what something is, nor strong typing.

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I’m assuming that anyone reading this blog has probably been using JavaScript for a while.  Many of you have used a number of the many frameworks that are available and most have used jQuery.  For the most part, you get what needs to be done, done.

But, I would also say that most of you have no idea how JavaScript works.  This is why I’ve written about JavaScript Variables, JavaScript Functions, and now JavaScript – Objects.

So, let’s start with the most basic of JavaScript questions.

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I’ve spent the last week putting together a reference app for Angular 2.  It is a great exercise to try to nail down the basics of how a new framework works.  Next week I plan on doing a similar exercise for React.

Anyhow, I thought for this week’s post, I would try to relay some of my impressions, and some of the issues I see with this new framework.

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Last week I talked about JavaScript variables gotchas.  This week, we want to take an in-depth look at JavaScript functions. Why? Well, for the same reason we looked at variables last week.  If you keep using JavaScript the way you think it works instead of the way it really works, at best, you will have a much harder time debugging your JavaScript code.  Worse case, you introduce some pretty nasty bugs into your code.

So, let’s start with a pretty basic JavaScript function question.  One I would use as a question if I were interviewing someone for a hard core JavaScript job.

What is the difference between the following two ways of declaring a function?

1
2
3
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5

function foo(){
}

var foo = function(){
}

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If you’ve been programming using JavaScript for any length of time, you’ve probably run into several of the JavaScript variable scope gotchas.  You may have even been able to fix them.  But you could prevent these gotchas if you understood better why the gotchas exist in the first place.

My goal, through a series of blog post on the topic, is to make us all better JavaScript programmers.  JavaScript is no longer a toy.  Those who survive in the new JavaScript eco system will be those who understand why JavaScript works the way it does.

I’m going to approach this topic as a series of puzzles.  This will show the issue and then we can discuss why the issue exist and what to do about it.

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A couple of weeks ago, I showed how to get Node.JS and Gulp working with Visual Studio 2015.  Last week I showed you how to bundle, minify, and cache-bust using Gulp.  This week, we are going to use Node.js to provide JavaScript Unit Test Code Coverage.

The main tools we will be using to pull this off are Karma and Istanbul.  The test we write will be using Jasmine.

If you don’t use Visual Studio, you should still be able to adapt these instructions to your own environment.  I’ve found getting Istanbul setup kind of tricky at times.  Since everything I’m going to show you here is pure Node.JS, you can ignore the Visual Studio parts.

Let’s get started.

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Last week I discussed how to setup Node.js and Gulp in Visual Studio 2015.  During that discussion, I mentioned that I’m using gulp to bundle, minify and cache-bust my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

This week, my intent is to walk you through exactly how I do that.

So, if you don’t already have Node.js and Gulp installed, you may want to go back and read the article I wrote last week.

Since most of the people who read this blog are ASP.NET developers, there may be a few .NET specific tips along the way.  But the Gulp file I am going to walk you through is technology agnostic.  So if you are using some other technology, you’ll still benefit from this article.

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