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Hacktoberfest Week Two – React and Push.js

In this week of Hacktoberfest, I added push notifications to the Node Chat project in my most recent Pull request. I used the Push.js library in order to accomplish this task. Well learning how to do this, I din’t find much documentation on using Push.js with React so I put together a small tutorial for today’s blog.

Integrating Push.js with React

Natively, there is currently no solution to use Push.js with React. In order to use Push.js with react you have to use it as an external libraries. Below is how I added Push.js to React as an external library.

First step:

Include the script file in the main “index.html” file for your app.

I used a CDN to do this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/push.js/1.0.7/push.min.js"></script>

Second step:

Import Push.js into your file.

Put the following line at the top of the .js file you want to use Push.js in.

import * as Push from "push.js";

After importing Push.js you can now create push notifications inside your react app.

Here’s an example of how to create a notification in a react component.

notify(){
 Push.create("Hello world!", {
     body: "Thanks for reading my Blog!",
     timeout: 5000,
     onClick: function () {
         window.focus();
         this.close();
     }
 });
}

 

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Hacktoberfest Week One

In my first week of Hacktoberfest I started off without any particular project in mind. I had a few ideas of what I wanted to work on, so I started by searching GitHub for a project. I was looking for something using JavaScript or C++.

After searching for a while I came across a application called NodeChat. In Issue #11 for the NodeChat project the owner asked for someone to move the public site over to React. Having used React, Node.js and Socket.IO I asked in the issue if I could do this.  After, that I started my work on the React app to replace the JQuery version that was previously used in the project.

Making a chat app using React

I started off with some project designing. I needed to figure out how I wanted to organize the react app. Also, I had to go through the existing JQuery file to get a better understanding of what the project is doing.

I decided on the below structure for the app.

    • App
      • This component is the core of the app were the Login Page is called and is currently were all the css and assets are located.
    • LoginPage
      • This component handles new and previous user login’s.  And handles displaying the login page or the chat page.
    • ChatPage
      • This compenent handles all the functionality of the chat.

Currently the flow of the app is as follows the app page displays the Login page. The login page creates a new user or uses a previous user then the Login page decides when to display the Chat page.

A update I think I will do at some point would be to make it so the App page receives props back form the Login page. That would instruct the App page when to display the Chat page. I think this would be a bit cleaner code.

There is still a bunch of stuff that need’s to be finished but at the moment the app is working on a basic level. I am hoping to get most of the bugs fixed as soon as I can.

I think this will be a good project for me over Hacktoberfest and probably after.

Here’s the link to my first PR of Hacktoberfest .

Below is the 2 class definitions for Login Page and Chat Page and I added a small comment about each function. Full Code available here.

class LoginPage extends Component {
    constructor(props) {}
    // Checks if user pressed enter key to submit there message.
    enterKeyPress(e) {}
    // Used to manage the State of the input field on the Login Page.
    setUsernameInput(event) {}
    // Calls checkIfPreviousUser()
    componentDidMount() {}
    // Sets the username 
    setUsername() {}
    // Checks current user is a previous user or calls setUsername() if not.
    checkIfPreviousUser() { }
    // Tell the server that we've had a user join
    userJoin() {}
    // Holds the content's of the Login Page
    displayLogin() {}
    // Render Login Page if not loged in or Chat page if Logged in
    render() {}
}


class ChatPage extends Component {
    constructor(props) {}
    // Calls greetUser() and Lisen's for New Chat messages.
    componentDidMount() {}
    // Displays Greeting message.
    greetUser() {}
    // Checks if user pressed enter key to submit there message.
    enterKeyPress(e) {}
    // Used to manage the State of the input field on the chat app.
    setChatInput(event) {}
    // Send's the message to the server.
    sendMessage() {}
    // Recieve's the chat messages from the server.
    addChatMessage(data) {}
    // Used to handle images(not tested).
    parseMessageText(inputString) {}
    // Used to handle images(not tested).
    imageFile(filetype) {}
    // Used to handle images(not tested).
    getFileType(inputString) {}
    // Used to handle images(not tested)..
    imageLink(inputString) {}
    // Used automatically scroll the page.
    scrollToBottom() {}
    // Render page content.
    render() {}
}