Introduction to Reducer

React application challanges

Many examples of React applications tend to be small and easily understandable. But in the real world, React apps tend to grow to a scale that makes it impossible to keep all the context in our heads. This can often lead to unexpected bugs when a given value isn’t what we thought it would be. That object we thought had a certain property on it? It turns out it ended up being undefined somewhere along the way. That function we passed in? Yeah, that’s undefined too. That string we’re trying to match against? We misspelled it one night when we were working after hours.

Using TypeScript for the code quality

Using TypeScript in a React application enhances code quality by providing static type checkingStatic typed programming languages do type checking (i.e., the process of verifying and enforcing the constraints of types on values) at compile-time., which catches errors early in development. It also improves readability and maintainability through explicit type annotations, making it easier for teams to understand the code structure. Additionally, TypeScript features like interfaces and genericsGenerics in TypeScript offer a means for creating reusable code components that work with a variety of types (rather than just one). make building robust, scalable applications easier.

State management with reducers

Large applications also tend to come with increasingly complicated state management. Reducers are a powerful pattern for managing a state in client-side applications. Reducers became popular with Redux, and are now built into React with the useReducer hook, but they’re framework and language agnostic. At the end of the day, a reducer is just a function. Redux and React’s useReducer adds functionality to trigger updates accordingly. We can use Redux with any frontend framework or without one altogether. We could also easily write our take on Redux if we were so inclined.

That said, Redux (and other implementations of the Flux architectureFlux is a software architecture pattern used for building user interfaces, particularly in web applications. It was developed by Facebook to address challenges they faced while building complex and interactive user interfaces. that it’s based on) often get criticized for requiring a lot of boilerplate code and being a bit cumbersome. At the risk of making an unintentional pun, we can leverage TypeScript to reduce the amount of boilerplate required and make the overall experience of using reducers more pleasant.