Confessions of a coding addict.

Writing unit for React classes written with ES6 is a bit less simple than for plain old ES5 JavaScript. The extra compilation steps mean that the production source files and the test code both need to be compiled before running. To perform this role I'm using Webpack.  Webpack provides bundling and compilation bringing my source code (test or production) down into one big ES5 file. To get Mocha tests running with Webpack. Getting a basic test running To get a basic test running, nothing  more than vanilla ES5 Java Script. Include the Mocha loader (npm install mocha-loader) Navigate to your test directory.  Run "webpack mocha!./testroot.js testBundle.js" Create an empty html file that includes testBundle.js after the body.  Open the html file. Using a config file Obviously we want to use more than just Vanilla.js we want to include React and ES6 components.  To do this I'm using a second config file, in addition to the one used to compile ...

I was deploying a small app, you could call it a Micro Service, today to our test/demo environment at work and found a bug where I hadn't implemented a shared API correctly. I realised my mistake. Walked over to my development machine (the test/demo environment is physically and logically separated from the rest of the network). Fixed the bug.  Ran tests. Pushed to CI.  Took the installer generated from the CI build walked back over. Installed the update.  All in less than 5 minutes.   I always hear about how Micro Services are quick to deploy, resilient to failure and scale-able, but rarely do I hear about the fact that they're quick to build.  This speed is because the compile time is lower and the test time is lower.  Overall it means that working on a Micro Service, or a small application in general is just more productive from a development point of view.  Micro Services is the buzz word at the moment so you probably didn't nee...

I've been playing with React and using React Router to build a demo app. The last couple of times I've sat down to work on it I've been struggling with what given hindsight seems like a very simple issue.  The issue I was having was that after a user had logged in they would not be redirected to the page they wanted to view.  They would have been authenticated successfully but the redirect was throwing an exception because the router object in the context was undefined.  The suggestions on how to fix this is to add this method to your React class. contextTypes{ router: React.PropTypes.object.isRequired } This will check that there is a router object available in the context and make it available through this.context.router If router is not available within the context object it will raise a warning in the console. Failed Context Types: Required context `router` was not specified in ... This is what I was getting.   Lots of searc...