What Is Redux?

A brief history

ReactJS was published in 2013 and it opened doors to creating beautiful single-page applications. ReactJS was an exciting library to use! A lot of people jumped at the opportunity and started rewriting their websites. As time passed, many developers discovered that creating and maintaining large applications with ReactJS became tedious. Don’t forget this was happening before the ReactJS team introduced hooks and context. Developers had to pass props from parents to nested children, going through multiple levels of irrelevant components. This is called prop drilling because getting to the child component through many ancestors feels like drilling.

In 2015, something very interesting happened: Dan Abramov and Andrew Clark wrote and published a new open-source library called Redux. ReactJS developers were mostly confused at first, given that Redux introduced new concepts to the ReactJS world. We could start thinking about global states that are accessible from anywhere in the app. In order to change a global state, we would need to use special functions called actions and also use something called reducers.