Finite State Machines with React
As JavaScript applications on the web have grown more complex, so too has the complexity of dealing with state in those applications — state being the aggregate of all the data that an application needs to perform its function. Over the last several years, there has been a ton of great innovation in the realm of state management through tools like Redux, MobX, and Vuex. Something that hasn’t gotten quite as much attention, though, is state design.
What in the heck do I mean by state design?
Let’s set the scene a little bit. In the past, when building an application that needs to fetch some data from a backend service and display it to the user, I’ve designed my state to use boolean flags for various things like isLoading, isSuccess, isError, and so on down the line. As this...