With such a large abundance of technical libraries, choosing the best tool for creating an app can be difficult. So, to make your life a little easier, here’s a list of unique libraries that you can use to get your next idea off the ground.
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Axios
Axios is one of the go-to libraries for JavaScript programmers. When the Axios library started getting popular, there wasn’t a browser-based API for a promise-based HTTP client. The standard XML HTTP Request (XHR) interface was awkward and hard to work with.
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However, developers all across the globe were happy to adopt Axios because its library made their lives easier. In October 2019, Axios was downloaded 25 million times from npm.
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The Axios library is a promise-based HTTP client designed for browsers and Node.js. It’s easy to use, allows you to create instances, has support for requests, gets responses from the server, transforms them, and automatically converts to JSON. It also has CSRF protection.
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Should you use it in 2022? It depends on many things. To cover all of its functionality, we’d need a whole other blog post just to do it. However, if you need to process many HTTP requests and capture errors, and write cleaner and more concise code, Axios is for you.
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Axios-mock-adapter
Axios-mock-adapter is a great simulator to test your system when the backend isn’t ready yet. Mocks are perfect for unit testing your code. Let's say you have to authenticate the user with the REST endpoint. The scenario goes like this:
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· if the user's password has expired, a "change password" screen is displayed;
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· when the backend fails to respond, the user is shown a screen to “try again later.”
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Without mocks, you need to ensure that you have the exact details configured in your authentication system. I can tell you from my experience it’s complicated.
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But with mocks, you can just set up the layout to return the response you expect for each scenario.
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Full-calendar
Calendars are an important part of our lives, and today people mostly use them electronically.
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Although Full-calendar does not have a detailed step-by-step guide describing how to achieve a goal, it includes a Getting Started Guide and a documentation page.
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This library is lightweight. It's highly customizable and has many different components. The website, demos, and documentation present the library as a mature, well-developed product that’s not scary to use.
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The calendar allows you to schedule resources and mark events. There’s a timeline viewer and various design themes.
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A solid plus is the availability of documentation for development in React, Vue, and Angular. Why should you use Full-calendar? Well, think about this. Products from Amazon, Samsung, and PayPal are based on this library.
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React-hook-form
If you’re looking for a lightweight library that helps you work with forms, React-hook-form could be what you need. Validate forms in seconds without creating your own state form, analyze complex forms and store the state in your application, and use controlled and uncontrolled forms and other external libraries.
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In short, great possibilities for a relatively small library.
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It allows you to write fewer lines of code, has an intuitive API, it’s small, and has no dependencies.
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React-I18next
The React-I18next library provides many possibilities, but I use it mainly for localization purposes. It allows us to create a vocabulary of words for each specific language and then write variables from these vocabularies instead of text.
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When we initialize a component, we choose the language and a word from the dictionary automatically replaces the variable — a must-have library for educational products where different language support is needed.
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React helmet
This library is for those who need to promote a website. Search engine optimization is critical because even the coolest application can go unnoticed by users.
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However, there are some difficulties to overcome:
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· single URL for all pages;
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· unified meta tags for all pages;
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· no content without working JS in the browser.
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But the good news is the community has long developed tools to solve these issues. React Helmet easily allows you to manage meta tags on your page. It works both on the client and the server and supports all the tags that are needed for SEO promotion – from title and meta to script and style.
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React-table
This is a compact and open-source library. It supports hooks and allows you to create fast and extensible table components. Here are just some of the features:
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· flexibility in customization;
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· support for sorting, filters, row selection and expansion, and column ordering;
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· fully controlled API;
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· animation and virtualization support;
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· scalability.
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Yup
Occasionally, processing form validation in React can be very tedious and time-consuming. Many other frameworks can boast their own form of management. Not with React, alas.
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However, there’s a working solution, and it’s called Yup.
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Yup is a simple and powerful library for validating js objects. Check file formats and maximum sizes, validate password confirmation, emails, and other required fields.
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Some of Yup's advantages are:
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· readability;
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· casting support;
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· prioritization of validating with the help of chaining;
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· validation across different parts of the app.
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React-charts
I’ve found that there are a handful of projects where work with different types of data is paramount. One of the best ways to present data in a pleasant and easy-to-understand way is to visualize it with charts.
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Histograms, pie charts, line graphs, horizontal and stacked bars, bands, areas, and bubbles: creating graphs with React-charts is very easy because it provides many ready-made components that are versatile and easily customizable.
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Luxon
Although there’s already a workable solution represented by Moment, Luxon features some new possibilities which make it a go-to library for many projects. Moreover, this alternative is developed by the Moment team themselves.
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The Luxon library is claimed to be a powerful, modern, and convenient tool for working with dates and times in JavaScript.
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Technically wise, Luxon is much more intuitive, enables the use of the browser’s internal capabilities, has time zone support that’s better than in any other JS libraries, and has good documentation.
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Overall, the library already has 7k+ stars on GitHub, and its popularity is only growing.
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Most of these libraries have alternatives, and it’s totally up to you whether to use them. However, I have been using these libraries for many years and on different projects. These are irreplaceable tools in my arsenal, and I hope they’ll help you save time and spice up your projects.
