Architecture
The Starter Kit architecture is designed to support scalable, modular applications. Built around Redux, it makes it simple to reason about your application's state, and as a result to write maintainable, error-free programs.
The application state and state changes are managed by Redux, a library that implements a pure, side-effect-free variant of the Facebook Flux architecture. Redux and Flux prescribe a unidirectional dataflow through your application. To understand Redux, check out this Cartoon guide by Lin Clark (it's great, not a joke!) and Dan Abramov's Redux course on egghead.io.
Redux helps us with synchronous updating of our state, but it doesn't provide an out-of-the-box solution for handling asynchronous actions. The Redux ecosystem has many possible solutions for this problem. In our application, we use the vanilla redux-thunk middleware for simple asynchronous actions, and redux-loop to handle more complex asynchronicity.
The components directory should contain React Native JSX components, which take their inputs in as props. In Flux/Redux parlance the components should be dumb/presentation components, meaning that components should not be connect()ed to the redux store directly, but instead used by smart/container components.
The components may be stateful if it makes sense, but do consider externalising state to the Redux store instead. If the state needs to be persisted, shared by other components, or inspected by a developer in order to understand the program state, it should go in the Redux store.
A component may be either written as an ES6 class Foo extends Component class or as a plain JavaScript function component. Usage of React.createClass should be avoided, as it will be deprecated in 15.5
If a component implementation differs between iOS and Android versions of the application, create separate .android.jsand .ios.js files for the component. In minor cases the React.Platform.OS property can be used to branch between platforms.
The Container (or View Container) is responsible for connect()ing the View component to the Redux store.
Redux connect() takes in two arguments, first mapStateToProps which selects relevant parts of the application state to pass to the view, and second mapActionsToProps, which binds Action Creators to the store's dispatcher so the actions are executed in the right context. These functions are often called selectors.
We think using mapStateToProps is a good practice, but avoid using mapActionsToProps in favour of calling dispatchourselves in the view. In our experience this leads to simpler, easier to reason about code (and a little less verbose PropTypes on the View).
We also use recompose to give you an ability to manage state, lifecycle events and more inside your containers, not components. Check you the docs at https://github.com/acdlite/recompose
