anarchism

Anarchism

React components with NO STATE.

Anarchism is a curated collection of React components intended to be used on unidirectional data flow architectures. The most well known is probably redux (but also other flux like implementations); however any approach that may benefit from stateless components may be used as well (e.g. FRP libraries, GraphQL + Relay, etc..).

How to use it

To use anarchism components you just need to install anarchism as a dependency in your project:

$ npm install --save anarchism

then simply import the components you want to use:

import { Intreact, Zlide } from 'anarchism';

and use them as normal React components according to the respective documentations.

What it is

The library contains two kind of components:

• pure components they are stateless components with no side-effects. They are responsible to render the visible part of your application. They are pure functions depending on props and context.
• impure components they are wrapper or decorator components that are responsible to deal with all the behaviors that may not be achieved without state or some kind of side effects (e.g. DOM stuff). They are allowed to have some state or side effects, but are not allowed to render anything visible, just wrap or decorate pure components.

Presentational components should use the minimum set of css properties to define their behavior and/or structure, anything else should remain unstyled.

A "future first" approach is preferred: use newest css and js features relying on transpilers and polyfills to maximize compatibility and eventually apply specific hacks only when polyfills are failing.

All the components will also play nicely when rendered on the server (isomorphic applications), especially impure components that are dealing with the DOM will have fallback solutions when the window object is not available.

What it is not

This project do not want to provide ready to use components with a common design. You will not find the typical front-end elements you can expect from common frameworks such as bootstrap, foundation, material-ui, etc...

While those libraries are great for prototyping, you will always end up wanting to deeply change their style and behavior on real world projects. Given their complex nature, very often the effort to adapt them to our own necessities is higher than writing from scratch a bunch of components.

Also, as far as I now, none of the well known front-end libraries are optimized to be used with unidirectional data flows and very often they rely heavily on state and DOM events and manipulations.

The only stateless react components library I've found so far is Rebass, a really nice project that should work very well for prototyping flux based applications. However it comes with its own style that you can eventually configure (on some of its aspects) using context properties or overwrite when needed. In a real project you will probably end up anyway spending more time overriding stuff than actually composing your application.

Why we need anarchism

This is an ongoing project where I want to collect components that respect the above rules. Ideally every component should be as much minimalistic and abstract as possible and you should not feel the needs to change it or to not being using all of its features.

Sometimes we end up implementing again and again the same behavioral pattern for lot of front-end components. A very basic example may be show different contents on a div depending on props, or more complex things like a full-blown stateless slider with no interface or any other styling than the very strictly needed for layout and animation.

This library want to abstract these patterns and its expected usage on real world project would be to create complete and styled front-end components that use anarchism components as dependencies to implement their behavior.

Want to contribute?

There are at least 4 ways to contribute to the project:

• Adding very simple components that abstract some basic pattern directly inside this repository
• Open an issue to propose an external project (available on npm) that may fit inside the library
• bug fixing, testing and cross-browser issues solving are always welcome
• contribute to the example folder with interesting components created using anarchism

List of pure components

• zlide - Lightweight and stateless slider component for React.js
• callout - Lightweight and stateless callout component for React.js
• zoom - Lightweight and stateless modal component for React.js based on flexbox

List of impure components

• intreact - Handling interactions with dumb react components.
• rezponsive - React decorator for responsive behaviors.