using Storybook

What Is Storybook & Why You Should Give It a Second Thought

Are you looking for a component explorer that has everything you need for your React and React Native project? Look no further. You can count on Storybook to bring your user interface ideas to life.

You don’t have to crack your head to complete the simple installation in your localhost. Follow the simple installation steps and configure the files to meet your requirements.

Coursera and Slack are testaments to the prowess of the component explorer. With the component-driven developer, you can work on the components of your GUI one at a time. The result? An impressive interface that will appeal to the market.

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ doesn’t apply when it comes to GUI. Storybook allows you tell the world your story with a beautiful interface.

Take a look at some of the standout features of the component explorer.

Why Should We Use Storybook?

1. External Development Environment

Storybook provides a development environment that doesn’t interfere with the overall project. Are you thinking of a new feature for your website? You can create and test individual components and find out what works. A great platform to try out new ideas. Right? Learn more from the virtual style guide.

2. Component Driven Development

With Storybook, you get to instantiate different features of individual components separately. The add-ons allow you to try different values for props as you optimize the functions. In the words of Storybook’s doc, “Browse your component’s library, its different states as you develop and test the components.”

3. Testing

As a developer, you don’t want to add features to your software without clear divisions between the components. With Softbook’s set of tests, you can exercise your code before trying it out in the full website – this will save you a lot of trouble in the long run.

What is more, non-developers can also perform these testing and updating functions. With unit testing, indulge your QA team and a few clients in testing your Storybook component library. The right feedback should help you fine-tune your component for any situation — the result, an efficient UI that remains functional regardless of the environment.

4. Visual

Once you choose the components you intend to use, Storybook’s separate web server provides a catalog view for these components. Take a peek at sample catalogs before you get down to business. Multiple JavaScript frameworks facilitate a considerable part of this feature.

5. Unit Testing

Part of the testing process requires that you answer pertinent questions about each component. You need to understand the interactions between the parent and each element. Unit testing ensures that you get to appreciate the behavior of each component in isolation. You don’t want to encounter hurdles once you start working on the main app.

Basic Examples

Think of it this way. You start creating your story – no Storybook from the off. With time, you discover limitations on some components and set out to upscale the parts. When you run these components separately, you notice that the style is distorted.

Why? The components relied on the parent’s code for styling. You’ve hit a snag. It gets worse; you can’t use these components fully on a different page.

Enter Storybook.

You get to develop each component independently and test the functionalities you hope to achieve with the unit. No parent. No problem. By the time you introduce this component to the whole application, you know what works, what doesn’t, and grey areas – issues that you can solve later without much hassle.

Complex Examples

‘Do I need to abandon my software development approach? How much technical effort do I need to make the most of Softbook’s feature?’ Well, as much as Storybook allows you to write a better component, you don’t need a complete overhaul of your development approach.

Take the Add-ons, for example. The Storybook community appreciates that you’ll need several additional functions and have provided just that.

You can use the more common UI controls like sliders, text boxes, and calendar pickers to expose the component props. In this case, the three controls represent numeric, string, and date props, respectively. You don’t need to be a guru to use this functionality.

As you work with Storybook, try as much as possible to separate the display components from the container components. You’ll have a more straightforward time with the story and have a better design. Wrapping these two components together takes away the isolation features of Storybook. No one wants that.

If you are looking to extend Stories, then the Decorators will do a good job.

SIS Integration

using storybook for coding purposes for software development
Closeup coding on a laptop.

With a variety of features to boast of, you can employ Storybook as part of your education software system. This component explorer ensures that you can provide a reliable infrastructure for the administration so that they can place their focus on achieving your educational goals.

Style Guide

As you think of the most appropriate style, think about the business logic of your institution. Data needs for the SIS suite will also influence the design you’ll settle on. Ensure that the SIS, registrar, and Storybook teams work together to develop the best suite.

Elements

Data is an essential component of the SIS integration system. Indeed, it is always necessary to ensure that all the teams are on the same page regarding your data needs for the suite.

As you work with SIS integration, Storybook allows you to work on multiple aspects with the Multiple Component feature. The SIS workflow will take you through data processing, where the integration framework assesses the integration type from an endpoint specific.

Test-Driven Development = Component-Driven Development

With the SIS integration framework done, you can test individual parts as you’d do with any other story. The idea is to ensure that the individual components are at their best apart from the parent application.

Conclusion

With Storybook, one thing is for sure: you get an excellent resource to drive software development from the off. Make the most of the additional testing methods to improve your application while at it.

There is no doubt that you’ve been trying to find an efficient way to develop and manage your components. Storybook, with a visual debugging feature, has earned the right to be part of your development tools. Do you have any doubts? Contact us today and get clarification.

The Entrance ‘What, Why?’ Series: React Edition

Welcome to the ‘What, Why?’ series hosted by Entrance. The goal of this series is to take different technologies and examine them from a technical perspective to give our readers a better understanding of what they have to offer. The web is filled with tons of resources on just about anything you could imagine, so it can be really challenging to filter out all of the noise that can get in the way of your understanding. This series focuses on the two biggest cornerstones of understanding new tools: What is it, and why use it? So, without further ado, let’s kick off this first edition with something you’ve probably heard of: React!

React, quite simply, is getting big. It’s one of the most starred JavaScript Libraries on GitHub, so it goes without saying that it’s garnered lots of followers, as well as fanboys. React was originally developed by Facebook for internal use and many will be quick to point out that instagram.com is completely written with React. Now, it’s open source and backed by not just Facebook, but thousands of developers worldwide and considered by many to be the ‘future of web development’. React is still new-ish, but has had time to mature. So, what is it?

What is React?

A JavaScript Library

First and Foremost: React is a JavaScript Library. Even if some call it a framework, it is NOT. It is ONLY a view layer. What is the purpose of the library? To build User Interfaces. React presents a declarative, component-based approach to UIs, aimed at making interfaces that are Interactive, stateful, and reusable. It revolves around designing your UI as a collection of components that will render based on their respective states.

Paired with XML Syntax

React is also often paired with JSX or JavaScript XML. JSX adds XML syntax to JavaScript, but is NOT necessary in order to use React. You can use React without JSX, but having it would definitely help make things more clean and elegant.

‘Magical’ Virtual DOM

A distinguishing aspect of React is that uses something magical called ‘The Virtual DOM’. Conceptually, virtual DOM is like a clone of the real DOM. Let’s make the analogy of your DOM being a fancy schmancy new sports car of your choice. Your virtual DOM is a clone of this car. Now, let’s say you want to trick out your sweet new ride with some killer spinny-rims, wicked flames decals on the sides and, the classical cherry-on-top, a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. When you apply these changes, React runs a diffing algorithm that essentially identifies what has changed from the actual DOM (the car) in your virtual DOM (your now-tricked-out clone). Next, it reconciles the differences in the Real DOM with the results of the diff. So, really, instead of taking your car and completely rebuilding it from scratch, it only changes the rims, sides, and rear-view mirror!

Why React?

Component Modularity

Now that we’ve got a reasonable understanding of what React is, we can ask: Why use it? One of the biggest pluses to React is the modularity caused by its paradigm. Your UI will be split into customizable components that are self-contained and easily reused across multiple projects; something everyone can appreciate. Not only that, but components make testing and debugging less of a hassle as well.

Popular Support

The popularity of React also plays to its advantage. Being fully supported by Facebook AND thousands of developers means there will be plenty of resources around for your perusing, and tons of knowledgeable, friendly folks eager to help you if you get stuck along the way. That also means there’s plenty of people working towards constantly improving the React library!

JSX + Virtual DOM

JSX is a nifty little plus in that, while it’s not required, you are able to use it, making the writing and maintaining of your components even more straightforward and easy.

Great Performance

Topping off our list of Pros, we’ve got the Virtual DOM. It opens up the capability of server side rendering, meaning we can take that DOM clone, render it on our server, and serve up some fresh server-side React views. Thanks to Reacts Virtual DOM, pages are quicker and more efficient. The performance gains are quite real when you are able to greatly reduce the amount of costly DOM operations.

Why Not React?

As great as anything is, it can be just as important to know why you SHOULDN’T use it. Nothing is the perfect tool for absolutely everything, so why wouldn’t you use React? Well…

Don’t Use React Where it’s Not Needed

React shines when you’ve got a dynamic and responsive web content to build. If your project won’t be including any of that, React might just not be needed, and could result in you adding a lot of unnecessary code. Another downer is that, if you did opt to avoid pairing JSX in with your react components, your project can get kind of messy and harder to follow.

Understand the React Toolchain

Some people don’t realize that React only represents the View. That means you’ll have to be bringing in other technologies in order to get something fully functioning off the ground. Developers typically recommend using Redux with React, as well as Babel, Webpack, NPM… so if you’re not already familiar with the common accompaniments of React, you could end up biting off a bit more that you want to chew.

So in the end, should you use React? Is the hype train worth jumping on? Well, that’s completely dependent on your project and the constraints involved. It’s something that you and your team will have to decide together. Hopefully after reading this article, you are able to recognize what React is, as well as why you should keep in in mind for the future. If you’re interested in a deeper dive into the subjects discussed here, check out the React site! We hope you were able to take away some good info from this edition of ‘What, Why?’, and if you’re looking for more, be on the lookout for our upcoming post on React-Native!

4 Unique Challenges for Testing Single Page Applications

Watch out for these four key recurring issues to prevent a bad user experience when you’re testing single page applications.

 

First, you need some sort of loading indicator for your pages.

You cannot let your users stare at an unchanging page for several seconds without any indication that clicking a link did something. In addition, if a process within a page is going to take more than a second to complete, it should have a loading indicator as well. If, for example, you are sorting or filtering a large list of items, you need an indication to the user that something is happening and that the application hasn’t frozen.

Second, watch out for pages loading on top of each other.

For instance, if you click a link to one page while another page is already loading, by default, they’ll both continue to load. This means that once one page finishes loading and displays to the user, the other page will continue loading and override it once it finishes. When this happens, you can easily end up viewing the wrong page. This can occur with elements within a page as well. You can see an example of this behavior if you use Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server work item queries; if you click two saved queries in a row, the first one to finish loading will show its work items in the results area, but once the second finishes loading, the results section will, without warning, switch to showing the second query’s results instead.

Third, pay attention to dynamic areas within otherwise static portions of a page, such as a header.

For example, if you have a shopping cart with an item count, you have to make sure that every user action that changes the contents of the shopping cart properly updates the item count in the header as well. Because the site isn’t refreshing every time you navigate to a new page, you can’t just save something in a database and expect the client to automatically update to match it. Additionally, you have to consider the desired behavior if these actions fail; in this example, if you try to add an item to your cart that is no longer available, in addition to giving the user an error, the shopping cart total should remain unchanged.

Fourth, as a tester, make sure that you are clearing your browser cache between builds, or that you are always using private windows to test.

Due to the nature of single page applications, caching can be particularly aggressive. This can lead to all sorts of problems, particularly when confirming that bugs were fixed. Of course, you also need to ensure that caching issues do not cause problems for users in production; you cannot expect your users to remember to clear their caches every time you give them an update!

With these four aspects of single page applications in mind, you will be well on your way to delivering a quality user experience.

How custom software ages | Application Development Video Series, Episode 1

We don’t typically think of software as something that can age. The code is written and run on a computer, so it doesn’t age like hardware does or like people do. It becomes obsolete or becomes less functional, unable to keep up with the demands of the business and the business users. Software is usually written based on a snapshot of a business need for a certain period or range of time. Unfortunately, software doesn’t change dynamically the way the business does. Businesses can change, market demands can change, the number of users can change, and the software can have trouble keeping up with that.Read More

SharePoint Consulting: Workflow Not Found

Managing New Workflow Manager Installation with SharePoint Consulting

I needed to remove a Web Front End (WFE) from a SharePoint farm for development reasons, but afterwards we noticed that workflows stopped working.  To remedy this, I decided to just re-install Workflow Manager on the main WFE.  Though this is not normally a recommended practice, we had few concerns since we are only working off a development environment. Read More