Felix Kling

Felix Kling

1574738346

Why React Hooks + Context API a better choice than React + Redux

Redux introduces a lot of complexity to our codebase with the excessive amount of code it requires. At best, this makes it an imperfect solution for state management in React applications. And yet, far too many React developers default to Redux for state management without considering other alternatives.

In this article, I will introduce the React Context API for state management, and show you what makes React Hooks plus the Context API a better solution than Redux.

Why we need a state management tool

In typical React, the way to handle data between disconnected components is through prop drilling. Since there is no global state that components can access if, for instance, you want to pass data from a top-level component to a fifth-level component, you’ll have to pass the data as a prop on each level of the tree until you get to your desired component.

This results in writing a ton of extra code, and giving components properties that they will never use also affects their architectural design. In order to solve this problem, we needed a way to provide a global state that all components, no matter how deeply nested they are, could access.

By solving this, Redux, an open-source JavaScript library for managing application state, became the go-to solution for React developers.

How Redux works

The Redux documentation describes it as a predictable state container for JavaScript applications that helps us to write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments, and are easy to test.

One disadvantage of prop drilling is the need for writing a considerable amount of extra code in order to access data from a top-level component. With Redux, this disadvantage is felt even more as a lot of complexity comes with all its extra code required for setting up a global state for our application. Redux requires three main building parts to function: actions, reducers, and store.

Actions

These are objects that are used to send data to the Redux store. They typically have two properties: a type property for describing what the action does and a payload property that contains the information that should be changed in the app state.

// action.js
const reduxAction = payload => {
  return {
    type: 'action description',
    payload
  }
};

export default reduxAction;

The type is usually in all caps, with its words separated by underscores. For example, SIGNUP_USER or DELETE_USER_DATA.

Reducers

These are pure functions that implement the action behavior. They take the current application state, perform an action, and then return a new state:

const reducer = (state, action) => {
  const { type, payload } = action;
  switch(type){
    case "action type":
      return {
        ["action description"]: payload
      };
    default:
      return state;
  }
};

export default reducer;

Store

The store is where the application’s state is housed. There is only one store in any Redux application:

import { createStore } from 'redux'

const store = createStore(componentName);

Since our application can only have one Redux store, in order to create a single root reducer for all our components, we’ll need the [combineReducers](https://redux.js.org/api/combinereducers) method from Redux.

With this long process and considerable amount of code required to set up Redux, imagine what our codebase will look like when we have multiple components to work with. Even though Redux solves our state management problem, it is really time-consuming to use, has a difficult learning curve, and introduces a whole new layer of complexity to our application.

Fortunately, the React Context API solves this problem. When combined with React Hooks, we have a state management solution that is less time-consuming to set up, has an easy learning curve, and requires minimal code.

The React Context API

The new Context API came with React 16.3. Here’s how Context is explained in the React documentation:

Context provides a way to pass data through the component tree without having to pass props down manually at every level.

The React context API is React’s way of managing state in multiple components that are not directly connected.

To create a context, we’ll use the createContext method from React, which accepts a parameter for its default value:

import React from 'react';

const newContext = React.createContext({ color: 'black' });

The createContext method returns an object with a Provider and a Consumer component:

const { Provider, Consumer } = newContext;

The Provider component is what makes the state available to all child components, no matter how deeply nested they are within the component hierarchy. The Provider component receives a value prop. This is where we’ll pass our current value:

<Provider value={color: 'blue'}>
  {children}
</Provider>

The Consumer, as its name implies, consumes the data from the Provider without any need for prop drilling:

<Consumer>
  {value => <span>{value}</span>}}
</Consumer>

Without Hooks, the Context API might not seem like much when compared to Redux, but combined with the useReducer Hook, we have a solution that finally solves the state management problem.

What are Hooks in React?

Hooks are a type of function that enables the execution of custom code in a base code. In React, Hooks are special functions that allow us to “hook into” its core features.

React Hooks provide an alternative to writing class-based components by allowing us to easily handle state management from functional components.

The useContext Hook

If you noticed, when explaining the React Context API, we needed to wrap our content in a Consumer component and then pass a function as a child just so we could access (or consume) our state. This introduces unnecessary component nesting and increases the complexity of our code.

The useContext Hook makes things a lot nicer and straightforward. In order to access our state using it, all we need to do is call it with our created context as its argument:

const newContext = React.createContext({ color: 'black' });

const value = useContext(newContext);

console.log(value); // this will return { color: 'black' }

Now, instead of wrapping our content in a Consumer component, we can simply access our state through the value variable.

The useReducer Hook

The useReducer Hook came with React 16.7.0. Just like the reduce() method in JavaScript, the useReducer Hook receives two values as its argument — in this case, the current state and an action — and then returns a new state:

const [state, dispatch] = useReducer((state, action) => {
  const { type } = action;
  switch(action) {
    case 'action description':
      const newState = // do something with the action
      return newState;
    default:
      throw new Error()
  }
}, []);

In the above block, we’ve defined our state and a corresponding method, dispatch, handling it. When we call the dispatch method, the useReducer() Hook will perform an action based on the type that our method receives in its action argument:

...
return (
  <button onClick={() =>
    dispatch({ type: 'action type'})}>
  </button>
)

The useReducer Hook plus the Context API

Setting up our store

Now that we know how the Context API and the useReducer Hook work individually, let’s see what happens when we combine them in order to get the ideal global state management solution for our application. We’ll create our global state in a store.js file:

// store.js
import React, {createContext, useReducer} from 'react';

const initialState = {};
const store = createContext(initialState);
const { Provider } = store;

const StateProvider = ( { children } ) => {
  const [state, dispatch] = useReducer((state, action) => {
    switch(action.type) {
      case 'action description':
        const newState = // do something with the action
        return newState;
      default:
        throw new Error();
    };
  }, initialState);

  return <Provider value={{ state, dispatch }}>{children}</Provider>;
};

export { store, StateProvider }

In our store.js file, we used the createContext() method from React that we explained earlier to create a new context. Remember that the createContext() method returns an object with a Provider and Consumer component. This time, we’ll be using only the Provider component and then the useContext Hook when we need to access our state.

Notice how we used the useReducer Hook in our StateProvider. When we need to manipulate our state, we’ll call the dispatch method and pass in an object with the desired type as its argument.

In our StateProvider, we returned our Provider component with a value prop of state and dispatch from the useReducer Hook.

Accessing our state globally

In order to access our state globally, we’ll need to wrap our root <App/> component in our StoreProvider before rendering it in our ReactDOM.render() function:

// root index.js file
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import App from './App';
import { StateProvider } from './store.js';

const app = (
  <StateProvider>
    <App />
  </StateProvider>
);

ReactDOM.render(app, document.getElementById('root'));

Now, our store context can be accessed from any component in the component tree. To do this, we’ll import the useContext Hook from react and the store from our ./store.js file:

// exampleComponent.js
import React, { useContext } from 'react';
import { store } from './store.js';

const ExampleComponent = () => {
  const globalState = useContext(store);
  console.log(globalState); // this will return { color: red }
};

Adding and removing data from our state

We’ve seen how we can access our global state. In order to add and remove data from our state, we’ll need the dispatch method from our store context. We only need to call the dispatch method and pass in an object with type (the action description as defined in our StateProvider component) as its parameter:

// exampleComponent.js
import React, { useContext } from 'react';
import { store } from './store.js';

const ExampleComponent = () => {
  const globalState = useContext(store);
  const { dispatch } = globalState;

  dispatch({ type: 'action description' })
};

Conclusion

To a good extent, Redux works for state management in React applications and has a few advantages, but its verbosity makes it really difficult to pick up, and the ton of extra code needed to get it working in our application introduces a lot of unnecessary complexity.

On the other hand, with the useContext API and React Hooks, there is no need to install external libraries or add a bunch of files and folders in order to get our app working. This makes it a much simpler, more straightforward way to handle global state management in React applications.

#Redux #React #JavaScript #WebDev

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Why React Hooks + Context API a better choice than React + Redux
Autumn Blick

Autumn Blick

1598839687

How native is React Native? | React Native vs Native App Development

If you are undertaking a mobile app development for your start-up or enterprise, you are likely wondering whether to use React Native. As a popular development framework, React Native helps you to develop near-native mobile apps. However, you are probably also wondering how close you can get to a native app by using React Native. How native is React Native?

In the article, we discuss the similarities between native mobile development and development using React Native. We also touch upon where they differ and how to bridge the gaps. Read on.

A brief introduction to React Native

Let’s briefly set the context first. We will briefly touch upon what React Native is and how it differs from earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is a popular JavaScript framework that Facebook has created. You can use this open-source framework to code natively rendering Android and iOS mobile apps. You can use it to develop web apps too.

Facebook has developed React Native based on React, its JavaScript library. The first release of React Native came in March 2015. At the time of writing this article, the latest stable release of React Native is 0.62.0, and it was released in March 2020.

Although relatively new, React Native has acquired a high degree of popularity. The “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019” report identifies it as the 8th most loved framework. Facebook, Walmart, and Bloomberg are some of the top companies that use React Native.

The popularity of React Native comes from its advantages. Some of its advantages are as follows:

  • Performance: It delivers optimal performance.
  • Cross-platform development: You can develop both Android and iOS apps with it. The reuse of code expedites development and reduces costs.
  • UI design: React Native enables you to design simple and responsive UI for your mobile app.
  • 3rd party plugins: This framework supports 3rd party plugins.
  • Developer community: A vibrant community of developers support React Native.

Why React Native is fundamentally different from earlier hybrid frameworks

Are you wondering whether React Native is just another of those hybrid frameworks like Ionic or Cordova? It’s not! React Native is fundamentally different from these earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is very close to native. Consider the following aspects as described on the React Native website:

  • Access to many native platforms features: The primitives of React Native render to native platform UI. This means that your React Native app will use many native platform APIs as native apps would do.
  • Near-native user experience: React Native provides several native components, and these are platform agnostic.
  • The ease of accessing native APIs: React Native uses a declarative UI paradigm. This enables React Native to interact easily with native platform APIs since React Native wraps existing native code.

Due to these factors, React Native offers many more advantages compared to those earlier hybrid frameworks. We now review them.

#android app #frontend #ios app #mobile app development #benefits of react native #is react native good for mobile app development #native vs #pros and cons of react native #react mobile development #react native development #react native experience #react native framework #react native ios vs android #react native pros and cons #react native vs android #react native vs native #react native vs native performance #react vs native #why react native #why use react native

Abhishek Jaiswal

1607768450

What are hooks in React JS? - INFO AT ONE

In this article, you will learn what are hooks in React JS? and when to use react hooks? React JS is developed by Facebook in the year 2013. There are many students and the new developers who have confusion between react and hooks in react. Well, it is not different, react is a programming language and hooks is a function which is used in react programming language.
Read More:- https://infoatone.com/what-are-hooks-in-react-js/

#react #hooks in react #react hooks example #react js projects for beginners #what are hooks in react js? #when to use react hooks

Jamison Gislason

Jamison Gislason

1627130640

How to Use Redux with React Hooks🔥 ( REDUX HOOKS )

Hello Friends,
In this Video, We are going to know How to use redux with react hook.
we have used redux inside Class based component with Connect() higher order component
but inside the functional based component , We couldnt use Connect!
So How can we use redux in fucntional based component ?
We will figure out it here !

Git Repository:
https://github.com/jaewonhimnae/reduxHooks-with-reactHooks

#redux #redux hooks #react hooks #react

Domingo Jakubowski

Domingo Jakubowski

1595396220

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

  1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
  2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.
skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

  1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
  2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
  3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Jamison Gislason

Jamison Gislason

1627009560

DARK MODE App with REACT Hook , REDUX Hook, Styled Components

Thank you for watching this video !
git repository :
https://github.com/jaewonhimnae/react-darkmode-app

#react hook #react #redux #redux hook