Unlocking Efficient State Management with Legend-State
When building modern applications using frontend frameworks such as React and React Native, managing state can be a major headache for developers. In this article, we will explore Legend-State, a state management library that aims to provide better performance and a better experience for developers.
What is Legend-State?
Legend-State is a lightning-fast state management library designed to optimize apps for the best performance, scalability, and developer experience. It is built and maintained by Jay Meistrich and is used by companies such as Legend and Bravely. Legend-State resolves issues with the performance and workload of developers when trying to manage states in React applications.
Key Features of Legend-State
- Fine-grained reactivity: Legend-State’s reactivity makes React apps faster by minimizing the number of renders and ensuring each update results in the smallest number of renderings.
- Simplicity: Legend-State is easy to use and requires no boilerplate code, special hooks, higher-order components, functions, or contexts.
- Fast and tiny: Legend-State is super fast and has a small file size of only 3Kb, improving the performance of websites and apps.
- Unopinionated: Legend-State allows teams to declare state globally or within components, creating state objects within React components and passing them down to children via props or Context.
Using Legend-State in a React Application
Let’s build a simple voting app to understand how Legend-State works. We will create a project, install Legend-State, and create a Card component to display each player’s information.
Creating a Card Component
We will create a Card.js file inside src/components to display each player’s name, nationality, country, and a button to increase and decrease votes.
Creating Our State with Observables
We will use observables to define our state, which will contain all the states and their functions used in our application. Observables are objects that hold any variable that can be updated in the event of a state change.
Accessing and Modifying the State in the Observables
We will use the get() function to access the raw value of the observable and the set() function to modify the state.
Adding Styles to Our Application
We will add styles to change the look of our application by updating the index.css file.
Persisting State
Legend-State provides a plugin to persist states, preventing data loss. We will use the persistObservable function to store our data in local storage.
API Request with Legend-State
Legend-State provides hooks to make API requests within a React component. We will use the useObservable hook to hold and make an API request using the fetch function.
By following these steps, we can efficiently manage state in our React applications using Legend-State, ensuring better performance and a better experience for developers.