Getting Started with Redux

On top of that, don’t forget that Redux is an in-memory state store. In other words, if your application crashes, you lose your entire application state. This means that you have to use a caching solution to create a backup of your application state, which again creates extra overhead. You will realize, you are writing some boilerplate code with actions and reducers. Though overtime this is much better than reacts state management which can progressively grow complex within stateful components quickly.

When should you use Redux

You now have a good grasp of how to integrate Redux into your React applications. In the next section, we will explore Redux Toolkit and discover how it can simplify the process of writing Redux code with less effort. So, to keep information even after a user leaves or closes the page, you need to store that information somewhere else outside of the app’s memory. Various techniques, such as local or server-side storage, can be used to accomplish this. Finally, it’s important to note that an application’s state is stored in memory when using Redux. Therefore, the state will be lost if a user refreshes the page or navigates away from the app.

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If you jump the gun and learn Redux with React, you are not going to fully grasp how React passes states around to other components. If you skip this learning process, it will be very hard to understand the problem Redux is aiming to fix. The short answer is no, Redux is not necessary for React applications.

  • If you are building an app similar to Google Docs where multiple users work together on a complex task, consider using Redux.
  • For example, if an action type is ADD_TASK, the payload might be an object containing a new task item’s “id”, “text”, and “completed status”.
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  • With Redux, we can make state data independent of the components, and when needed, a component can access or update through the Redux store.
  • For example, if the action type is ADD_TASK, the reducer returns a new state object with a new task added to the tasks array.
  • This is important for consumer-facing applications where the interface changes based on user input.

It’s not recommended to learn Redux and React at the same time if they are both new to you. With Redux, you must “dispatch” an action to update any data in an app. This restriction makes it possible to hook into almost every aspect of what’s happening in an app.

Time-Travel Debugging

If the same state and action are passed to a reducer, the same result is always produced because reducers are pure functions. This makes it possible to implement arduous tasks like infinite undo and redo. It is also possible to implement time travel — that is, the ability to move back and forth among the previous states and view the results in real time. Therefore, make sure to check if you need Redux before introducing its complexity. Although it’s a reasonably efficient pattern that promotes pure functions, it might be an overhead for simple applications that involve only a couple of UI changes.

When should you use Redux

But all of these benefits come with tradeoffs and constraints. One might feel it adds up boilerplate code, making simple things a little overwhelming; but that depends upon the architecture decisions. While our application grows to a higher number of components, maintaining data consistency becomes a hairy challenge. It’s not an easy task to manage each component’s state while sharing it with many other components. You’ll likely experience data inconsistency bugs, a fearsome nightmare for frontend developers.

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The reducer then uses a switch statement to check the “type” of the action, and based on that type, it updates the state accordingly. Redux is a state management library that allows you to manage the state of your JavaScript applications more efficiently and predictably. When I started learning Redux, I found it challenging to wrap my head around the concepts. Despite reading many online resources, I struggled to grasp the core ideas. So the above code is not correct, because in the reducer we should not modify the original state.

The Redux store is the main, central bucket which stores all the states of an application. It should be considered and maintained as a single source of truth for the state of the application. Maybe not but context api might do the same thing to redux that react did to jquery. Right, I see that immer is included, Redux Thunks is included by default, there are standardized ways of creating the store, actions, reducers … The good news is that our official Redux Toolkit package eliminates all the “boilerplate” around using Redux. After 3 years redux coding, I turn to usie only useReducer + props without Context, that is the most simple solution.

Optimistic UI is a way to improve the user experience of an app. It makes the app appear to respond faster over a slow network. It’s a popular strategy in apps that require real-time responses, why redux for example, a first-person shooter game. This approach is more efficient than the naive way of fetching data from every component. But how does Shotwell pass the ingredients to other chefs?

When should you use Redux

In this article, I will explain Redux in the simplest possible way. As someone who initially struggled with understanding Redux, I know how frustrating it can be to learn a new concept. But I hope this article will help make the concepts of Redux more accessible to beginner learners. Here, while dispatching an action to the store, we’re passing a payload with some value which we’re using inside the reducer to increment or decrement the store value.