redux-saga VS css-modules

For the backend, we chose Python, Django Rest Framework. On the frontend, React, Redux, Saga, Sass. Let’s start with the backend, which was managed by Yegor. He writes about the server part of the project himself.

The whole article properly the best explanation of generators I have come across. This quote stuck out:

> Generators are a special type of function that can return multiple pieces of data during its execution. Traditional functions can return multiple data by using structures like Arrays and Objects, but Generators return data whenever the caller asks for it, and they pause execution until they are asked to continue to generate and return more data.

Applications of generators? I have only used Redux-Saga[1]. Can't even think of other libraries that use them, but would be interested in learning.

[1]: https://redux-saga.js.org/

redux-saga. The most popular effects library in js

Redux can be extended with a lot of other packages. For example with a side effect manager, you can separate side effects from your business logic, help with error handling and in the same process make testing of side effects a lot easier.

Consumer vs. Producer: Check out Redux Saga

Your app will likely have to deal with async calls like making remote API requests. redux-thunk and redux-saga were created to solve those problems. They may take some time to understand as they require understanding of functional programming and generators. Our advice is to deal with it only when you need it.

Hey thanks for the thoughtful response.

I agree with everything you mentioned here. I'd love to continue to chat with you about how to make testing sagas better.

If you'd like, it would be great if we could move this convo to https://github.com/redux-saga/redux-saga/discussions/2337

If there are dependent API calls, you can probably look at redux-saga. It’s one of the best libraries out there to manage the data.

redux-saga makes use of them in really nice way. https://redux-saga.js.org/ That’s where I’ve used them the most.

One aspect of CSS modules that I truly appreciate is its ability to compress class names into very short hashes. This feature allows me to keep my CSS selectors as long and descriptive as needed, while still compressing them into concise three or four character hashes. It aligns with my rule for CSS: selectors should be written for human readability, but compressed for machine efficiency.

Use methodologies such as BEM, and technologies including CSS modules, CSS-in-JS, and Shadow DOM to isolate the styles of each micro-application and prevent conflicts, thus ensuring reliable encapsulation and modularity.

For many years, Culture Amp took the second option, and distributed shared components without compiled CSS. This meant that every app that consumed shared components needed to include the necessary CSS build tooling – at that time CSS Modules and node-sass – with a compatible version and configuration. This was relatively easy to set up, but over time proved difficult to maintain. When node-sass was deprecated in favour of (the much faster but slightly incompatible) Dart Sass, this demanded a difficult lock-step migration across all those codebases, which we have yet to achieve. And as new applications have switched to Tailwind for their own styles, they've had to continue to maintain those old build tools in parallel for the shared components' styles.

So CSS modules are a form of 3rd-party CSS-in-JS, where what you import are the class names, which are then usually obfuscated etc at compile time, and all the actual style declarations are (usually) compiled into a single css file or tag as part of the bundling process. You can read the og docs on'em here, and you've probably seen'em used in React like:

import styles from "./styles.css";

function Example(){
    return (
        

            Hello
        
    );
}

They predate the ability to import non-js files in vanilla by a good while, and rely on the compile process to translate your .css files into .js files that can be imported using whichever loader you use in your bundler.

Import assertions are a vanilla way to import non-js files by telling the browser how to import them; assert { type: "css" } says to treat the file as CSS and create a CSSStyleSheet, assert { type: "json" } says to treat the file as JSON and create a JSON object - and hopefully assert { type: "html" } will hopefully arrive soon and create a #document-fragment or something similar.

Hope that clears it up!

Extensions of CSS: for example, Sass, Less, Tailwind, CSS Modules, to make stuff look a certain way on your own.

The components are styled with CSS modules. When building the library, these styles will get transformed to normal CSS style sheets. This means that the consuming application will not even be required to support CSS modules. (In the future I want to extend this tutorial to use vanilla-extract instead.)

NextJS comes with built-in support for CSS Modules which allows you to scope your styles locally in individual components without worrying about name collisions or messing up other parts of the codebase.

CSS modules are not to be confused with mixins, as they serve the opposite purpose. While mixins are components or functions to be reused globally, modules are style sheets with a local scope used in a similar way as styled components in React.

CSS Modules CSS Modules is a pre-processing step: by default, styles are scoped locally to the current component, and the transpiler ensures no conflicts.