When Shawn meets Mike and ReactJS

It's a bright day at Adequate Consulting. Its' also Shawn's first day at the company. Shawn had joined Adequate to work on its amazing products and also because it uses and develops exciting new technologies.

After onboarding the company, Shelly, the CTO, introduced Shawn to Mike. Mike, a senior developer at Adequate, is a jolly man, who loves exploring new things.

"So Shawn, here's Mike", said Shelly. "He'll be mentoring you as well as pairing with you on development. We follow pair programming, so expect a lot of it with him. He's an excellent help."

With that, Shelly took leave.

"Hey Shawn!" Mike began, "are you all set to begin?"

"Yeah, all set! So what are we working on?"

"Well we are about to start working on an app using https://openlibrary.org/. Open Library is collection of the world's classic literature. It's an open, editable library catalog for all the books. It's an initiative under https://archive.org/ and lists free book titles. We need to build an app to display the most recent changes in the record by Open Library. You can call this the Activities page. Many people contribute to Open Library. We want to display the changes made by these users to the books, addition of new books, edits, and so on, as shown in the following screenshot:

"Oh nice! What are we using to build it?"

"Open Library provides us with a neat REST API that we can consume to fetch the data. We are just going to build a simple page that displays the fetched data and format it for display. I've been experimenting and using ReactJS for this. Have you used it before?"

"Nope. However, I have heard about it. Isn't it the one from Facebook and Instagram?"

"That's right. It's an amazing way to define our UI. As the app isn't going to have much of logic on the server or perform any display, it is an easy option to use it."

"As you've not used it before, let me provide you a quick introduction."

"Have you tried services such as JSBin and JSFiddle before?"

"No, but I have seen them."

"Cool. We'll be using one of these, therefore, we don't need anything set up on our machines to start with."

"Let's try on your machine", Mike instructed. "Fire up http://jsbin.com/?html,output"

"You should see something similar to the tabs and panes to code on and their output in adjacent pane."

"Go ahead and make sure that the HTML, JavaScript, and Output tabs are clicked and you can see three frames for them so that we are able to edit HTML and JS and see the corresponding output."

"That's nice."

"Yeah, good thing about this is that you don't need to perform any setups. Did you notice the Auto-run JS option? Make sure its selected. This option causes JSBin to reload our code and see its output so that we don't need to keep saying Run with JS to execute and see its output."

"Ok."