react-hot-loader VS styled-components

React Hot Loader - Tweak React components in real time

Developer Experience - There are a number of tools that improves the development experience with React. React Developer Tools is a browser extension that allows you to inspect your component, view and manipulate its props and state. Hot reloading with webpack allows you to view changes to your code in your browser, without you having to refresh the browser. Front end development involves a lot of tweaking code, saving and then refreshing the browser. Hot reloading helps you by eliminating the last step. When there are library updates, Facebook provides codemod scripts to help you migrate your code to the new APIs. This makes the upgrading process relatively pain-free. Kudos to the Facebook team for their dedication in making the development experience with React great.

I am considering how to make my compiler (which outputs JavaScript), output patch changes, which somehow update the server or browser with the code changes, so you don't have to shutdown/restart the server or refresh the page. I was going to take a look at the react-hot-loader source code, but it's a little too abstract, it will take a while / few days at least to start to grok.

I am starting to look through the source of react-hot-loader, but it is no insignificant beast. Can someone explain at a high level how this is implemented, just in enough detail so one could reason about how to reimplement this functionality in another programming language?

[HMR] bundle rebuildingclient.js?3ac5:126 [HMR] bundle rebuilt in 557msprocess-update.js?e13e:27 [HMR] Checking for updates on the server...process-update.js?e13e:81 [HMR] The following modules couldn't be hot updated: (Full reload needed)This is usually because the modules which have changed (and their parents) do not know how to hot reload themselves. See http://webpack.github.io/docs/hot-module-replacement-with-webpack.html for more details.process-update.js?e13e:89 [HMR] - ./src/containers/root.tsxprocess-update.js?e13e:89 [HMR] - ./src/index.tsx I've stepped through these steps as best I can tell, but am still having no luck.

I'm using react-hot-loader and I'm very confused about its example code:

react-hot-loader - Tweak React components in real time

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.