16. Using a Frontend JavaScript Library with Django

Overview

This chapter introduces the basics of JavaScript and ends with building an interactive web frontend for Bookr using the React JavaScript framework. You will learn how to include the React JavaScript framework in a Django template, and how to build React components. This chapter also includes an introduction to JSX, a special format that combines JavaScript code and HTML – you will also learn how Babel transpiles JSX into plain JavaScript. Later, you will learn about the fetch JavaScript function which is used to retrieve information from a REST API. Toward the end of the chapter, you will be introduced to the Django {% verbatim %} template tag, which is used to include unparsed data in a Django template.