javascript When should I use Redux in my react application?

With Redux, the state of your application is kept in a store, and each component can access any state that it needs from this store. Redux is a predictable state container designed to help you write JavaScript apps that behave consistently across client, server, and native environments, and are easy to test. First, we’ll review the basics of Redux and how it functions. Then we will see how using Redux can help you in your app by using a simple but practical component.

As pure functions, they do not change the data in the object passed to them or perform any side effect in the application. Given the same object, they should always produce the same result. It’s been used by many companies (Uber, Khan Academy, Twitter) and in many projects (Apollo, WordPress’ Calypso), successfully in production.

Configure Redux Tool Kit in Next Js 13 project.

In React (and other frameworks as well), communication between two components that don’t have a parent-child relationship is discouraged. React advises that if you must do this, you why redux can build your global event system following Flux’s pattern — and that’s where Redux comes in. Yes, it’s possible to write a complete application using nothing but a framework.

After performing action here, one has to wait till the delivery. There is a process that takes time and follows whenever one orders something from a favorite e-commerce website. Similarly, in redux, after performing the action, there is a term called dispatch, which sends the action to the reducer.

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In most cases, it’s not a big deal, and the slowdown is not noticeable. Still, when there’s a large amount of data in the store and when the data changes frequently (e.g. when the user is typing rapidly on a mobile device), the UI may become sluggish as a result. The popular undo/redo feature requires system-level planning. Because undo/redo needs to record and replay every single change of data in the app, you must take it into account in the architecture from the very beginning. If it’s done as an afterthought, it’d require changing a lot of files which is a recipe for countless bugs. As with the “context” API, there might be a new “setState” API in a future version of React.

Later on, even if the computer restarts, the app can load all the data and continue from exactly the same spot, as if it’s never been interrupted. Redux supports optimistic UI in the same fashion as what it does for undo and redo. It makes it easy to record, replay and revert changes of data when receiving a negative result from the server. This approach works because most of the time everything is OK. When things are not OK, the app will revert the previous UI updates and apply the actual result from the server, for example, show an error message. It can be overwhelming if we don’t have a good structure for all this logic.

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The state and actions of the application can also be easily tracked and inspected using Redux DevTools. This feature helps debug and understand how the app works under the hood. This can be incredibly useful when debugging your application, as you can inspect the state and actions in real-time. The above command sequence will create a new React project using the Vite build tool and install all necessary dependencies. A perfect analogy for a reducer would be a kitchen blender.

• We can ask our very kind chef Shotwell to do the shopping for all his chef friends.
• I came across a problem where Context API would re-render every child components that it wrapped.
• Note how in the above example, we dispatch an action on click of the button.
• Next, we have created a reducer called cartReducer which takes the state (with the default initial state) and the action as parameters.
• At the time of writing this article, the interface of Context API isn’t optimized for high-frequency updates.

Moving the state up in the tree works in simple cases, but in a complex app you might find you are moving almost all the state up, and then down using props. If a user signs into the application, the active users component will immediately update with a new active user email. So, the index.js file is the ideal place to create a Redux store. React-Redux is the official Redux UI binding library for React applications, and it’s maintained by the Redux team. The Redux team has created three libraries, namely Redux, React-Redux, and Redux Toolkit. All three libraries work together to give you the most out of your React development experience, and in this tutorial article, you’ll learn how to use them.

Redux offers a specific approach to handing state in your application. You can use Redux together with React, or with any other view library. It is tiny (2kB, including dependencies), but has a large ecosystem of addons available.

It’s a great tool, and there are some great reasons to use it, but there are also reasons you might not want to use it. Make informed decisions about your tools, and understand the tradeoffs involved in each decision. Besides being used extensively by companies like Uber and Twitter, Redux has also been implemented successfully on projects such as WordPress. Sure the argument that Redux isn’t a great fit for every application out there exists, and that’s true. Even though Redux might not be ideal solution for your app or framework, I highly recommend checking it out, especially for React applications.