React Most

A Monadic Reactive State Container for React Components

npm install react-most --save

What

most.js is very high performance Monadic reactive streams lib. Rich User Interaction App is natively fit Reactive Programming pretty well.

React is awesome for writing UI Components.

So, what react-most does is simply making you React Components Reactive.

react-most is simple and only 90 lines of code. only depends on most and react.

data flow is simple and one way only

• Action will generate value and add it into Intent Stream
• Sink create new Stream based on action type in Intent Stream
• Sink transform a value Stream into a oldState=>newState mapping Stream
• State subscribe to Sinks changes

Why not (just using existing state container e.g.) redux

When I play around with redux, it's awesome but

1. it take little time to make it ready.
2. it's using too many concept that we probably don't even care, which make it's learning curve a little steep(it take a gitbook to document just a state container?)
3. Reducers (long switch statements which are syntactically ugly but semantically ok) -- Andre
4. switch statement is ugly and hardly composable
5. again, I couldn't agree more on Andre's article about react/redux.

Inspired by Reactive Programming, Cycle.js and Redux, we can do something better to reduce the complexity of managing react state, the reactive way, by only introduce a little bit of reactive programming concepts.

Why indeed?

Redux is awesome, but if you're big fan of Functional Reactive Programming, you would've imaged all user events, actions and data are Streams, then we can map,filter, compose, join those streams to React state.

Pure Functional, Declarative & Monadic

finstead of imperative describe what you want to do with data at certain step, we simple define data transforms and compose them to data flow. No variable, no state, no side effort at all while you composing data flow.

Composable and Reusable Sinks

sinks are composable and reusable, not like reducer in redux, where switch statement are hard to break and compose.

Transducers support

transducer is another high perfomance way to compose data flow other then monadic.

writing actions in transducers improve reusablity.

Time Travel

since we have all action's Stream, we can easyliy reproduce all the action anytime, or get snapshot of state stream and going back in time.

you can pass history as 3rd parameter of connect

connect(App, intent$=>[awesome flow], {history:true})

connect will populate history stream with all state history

then you get a create action to deal with historyStream.

Modular and Easy to Extend

if you're from Rx.js, it's easy to switch rx engine into react-most, by simply pass a props named engine to Most component

import rxEngine from 'react-most/engine/rx'
<Most engint={rxEngine}>
  <App />
</Most>

How

there's only 3 things you should notice when using react-most, I'll explain by a simple counter app.

1. Component Wrapper

import Most from 'react-most'
<Most>
  <Counter />
</Most>

2. Define How to connect Component and Streams

import {connect} from 'react-most'
import most from 'most'
let RxCounter = connect(Counter, function(intent$){
  let defaultState$ = most.of(_=>({value:0}))
  let addSink$ = intent$.filter(x=>x.type=='add').map(({increment})=>state=>({value: state.value+increment}))
  return {
    add: increment=>({type: 'add', increment}),
    defaultState$,
    addSink$,
  }
});

here are things you may need to pay attention to:

2.1. transform intent stream to state mapper stream

the transformer accept a Intetent Stream intent$(by convention, all Stream type variable name with suffix $), and create and return new Intent Streams(here we call those new stream -- sinks)

  let addSink$ = intent$.filter(x=>x.type=='add').map(({increment})=>state=>({value: state.value+increment}))

here we filter out only add intent and do something about it.

when I mean something, I mean transform intent to be a state transformer. which means Intent Stream of values

--{value: 1}--{value: 2}--{value:3}-->

becomes a Stream of functions which tranform old state into new state

--state=>({value: state.value+1})--state=>({value: state.value+2})--state=>({value: state.value+3})-->

2.2. define action mapper that can be use to added intent to your Intent Stream.

    add: increment=>({type: 'add', increment}),

here it define a add action mapper, it define how you can use the action. it's pretty clear here that the search action will accept only one arg increment, and {type: 'add', increment} is something will be send to Intent Stream when action is called.

3. Use the actions

like redux, but much simpler, when you wrap your App, your App get a actions props, and you can pass it all along to any child Component.

<button className="add1"
       type="checkbox"
       onClick={()=>this.props.actions.add(1)} />

More Examples

Performance

react-most no more than creating stream from your actions, and bind it to state stream. no any other computations happen in react-most. so please refer to most.js's perf which is realy Great!

I also do a simple benchmark with 8k times of performing counter increase action

Memory Usage Before: { rss: 32501760, heapTotal: 16486912, heapUsed: 11307128 }
Memory Usage After: { rss: 34418688, heapTotal: 18550784, heapUsed: 11932336 }
Elapsed 8ms

basically the same level of performance as redux(which is 10ms in the same testing)

Thanks to...

• most
• React
• redux
• Om
• Cycle
• transdux