MiniReact is a fairly working React implementation which aims to play like some basic React functionality. It was written with these keys concepts in mind:

• Immutability;
• Separation of concerns;
• Unit tests;
• Error handling;

What we take into account

As the boilerplate uses arrows functions and class expressions, MiniReact was developed with these browsers in mind:

• Edge >= 12
• Firefox >= 36
• Chrome >= 49
• Safari >= 10
• Opera >= 36
• Android Chrome >= 67

We don't try to be a complete React implementation, but to permit the users to create complex tree dependencies between simple tag elements and components, include/remove attributes and event listeners on the fly

Components

MiniReact lets you define components as classes. To define a MiniReact component class, you need to extend MiniReact.Component (available as a global Component class as well)

class MyComponent extends Component {
  render() {
    ...
  }
}

setState(func)

If you use a class component, you will have access to this method. Different from React, setState only accepts a function that should return an object, that object will be merged with component internal state, and it is synchronous.

Virtual DOM Node

You can create a virtual dom node using the global factory node, it will return a VDOM to be used as result of a render function from a class component.

node accepts two types of parameters:

• blueprint object
• string

blueprint object

• blueprint {object}
• blueprint.tagName {string} - any valid html tag
• blueprint[attribute_name] {any} - an attribute that should be applied to that tag
• blueprint.children[] {blueprint|string} - an array of values that are accepted by node factory, if a textContent attribute is found this option will be ignored.

string

Any text is valid as it will be converted to a span vnode internally.

Internals

Bellow you can see the basics decisions and conventions we used them while this lib was being developed

Directory structure

The directory structure was designed with separation of concerns in mind, each folder has a special meaning

|-- public
|-- src
    |-- dom
    |-- vdom

public

The public directory is where the result assets of this project are located in, it is designed to be the public folder on a hosted environment. Be carefull what you put there

src

This folder has the core code used by MiniReact and the main entrypoint

vdom

This directory hosts the Virtual DOM Implementation, diffing and all related code

dom

This directory hosts the DOM manipulation engine etc. Modules that has the name ending with *ing must be considered as non free of side effects

How it works

MiniReact has three phases which are:

• constructing
• patching
• unmounting

constructing

At this phase, for each vnode we verify if it is a VNode Element, if true we create a DOM Element and returns a new VNode with this DOM Element as a child, otherwise we assume it is a Component, wire up the paching DOM mechanism and calls its render function and start over this phase recursively with the result of the render

patching

This phase is used to diff what we have in the past with what we have now as props (and state), we apply this modifications to the DOM

unmounting

This phase is the cleanup one, where we remove DOM Nodes and try to free the garbage

Development scripts

Requirements

• NODE >=8.11.3
• NPM ~5.6.0

In order to build this application localy you must first install nodejs

npm install

Installs package dependencies

npm run dev

Start this project in development mode opening your browser at http://localhost:3000

npm run build

Build this project for publishing

npm run start

Build this project in production mode opening your browser at http://localhost:3000

npm run test

Execute all tests

npm run test:watch

Execute all tests, but keep watching for changes. Good for development.

npm run test:coverage

Generate coverage report into the folder ./coverage/Icov-report/