Simplifying State Management with Storeon
When it comes to managing application state, React developers often find themselves torn between the efficiency of the Context API and Hooks, and the power of Redux. While the combination of Context API and Hooks can be inefficient for large-scale applications, Redux can be overkill for smaller ones. That’s where Storeon comes in – a tiny, event-driven React state management library that offers a simpler alternative.
What is Storeon?
Storeon is built on the principles of Redux, but with a more modular and event-driven approach. It uses the Context API internally to manage state, making it easy to visualize and debug state changes with the Redux DevTools. With Storeon, you can create a store, define modules, and emit events to update the state.
Creating a Store
A store in Storeon is a collection of data stored in an application’s state. You create a store using the createStoreon() function, which accepts a list of modules. Each module is a function that accepts a store parameter and binds event listeners. The store has three methods: store.get() to retrieve the current data, store.on(event, callback) to register an event listener, and store.dispatch(event, data) to emit events.
Events in Storeon
Storeon is an event-based state management library, which means changes to the state are emitted by events defined in the state modules. There are three inbuilt events in Storeon: @init for setting the initial state, @dispatch for debugging, and @changed for state changes. You can also define custom events without the @ prefix.
Building a Notes App with Storeon
To demonstrate how Storeon works, let’s build a simple notes app. We’ll create a store, define modules, and emit events to update the state. We’ll also use another package from Storeon to save our state data in localStorage.
Setup and Installation
First, we’ll set up our project structure and install the dependencies needed for our notes application. We’ll create our project folder, initialize the directory, and install the required packages.
The Parent Component
Next, we’ll write the parent component in our index.js file, which will render our notes component. We’ll import the required packages and build our application store by writing the code for the initialization and operations of the state in store.js.
The Store
In store.js, we’ll create a module to store our state alongside its supporting events to handle operational changes. We’ll import the createStoreon method from Storeon and the unique random ID generator UUID. We’ll define the state and populate it with two notes, and then define the state events.
The Notes Component
In Notes.js, we’ll write our notes app component. We’ll import our dependencies and write our component, using the useStoreon Hook to get the state and dispatch method. We’ll define methods to emit our state-defined events in our component.
Running the App
Finally, we’ll render our notes component in index.js, import our store and the Storeon store context component, and edit the scripts section in the package.json file. We’ll run our app and add and delete notes.
Visualizing State Changes with Redux DevTools
Storeon shares similar attributes with Redux, which means state changes can be visualized and monitored in the Redux DevTools. We’ll import the devtools package and add it as a parameter to the createStoreon method in our store.js file.
Conclusion
Storeon is a powerful and flexible state management library that offers a simpler alternative to Redux. With its event-driven approach and modular style, Storeon makes it easy to manage state in your React applications. Try it out today and see how it can simplify your state management needs!