Additional Topics
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Two additional concepts that appear frequently in React are the component life cycle and the Flux architecture.
There are some additional points in the component life cycle that you may want to take advantage of. Examples include when props change, or when we remove a component from the DOM. In order to perform different actions during the life cycle of a component, just define the following functions in the component.
componentWillMount – Fired once before the initial component render
componentDidMount – Fires once after the initial component render
componentWillReceiveProps – Fires whenever there is a change to props
componentWillUnmount – Fires before the component unmounts from the DOM
While you can incorporate a server with React through a RESTful API and AJAX (jQuery), generally React is used with a different type of architecture called Flux. Watch the video on the Flux Overview page below to understand some of the benefits behind this highly-scalable architecture.
React is substantially different from Angular because its main goal is to render UI based on data. We can keep track of static data using props, and keep track of dynamic data using state. By isolating data in state, we can keep track of when data is changed and re-render the UI accordingly.
Incorporating React with an API involves nothing special. In fact, you can use jQuery's .ajax function to make requests inside a React component, then call setState when the data is ready.
React Addons