If you are writing React applications you probably know about higher order components or render props (which by the way I think is kind of a form of higher order component pattern). In both cases we have a component that encapsulates logic and passes props down to children. Recently at work we came to the idea that we may push this further and represent some functionalities which are out of React in the same fashion - with a single tag in our components tree.

(This article is part of React in patterns series.)

React is highly composable. And the API that enables that is props.children. It gives us the power to create a placeholder that is later filled with content from the outside.

I like the CSS only solutions. Very often I need to select a specific DOM element. Sure I could add a new class, but it is always nice if I can do that inside my stylesheets. It just looks better and keeps my HTML markup clean. first-child, last-child and nth-child are made exactly for this purpose.

Sometimes, when you work on some project, you find something that is small, but very interesting and useful. Usually I'm adding such kind of things in classes that I like to call helpers. The following tips are part of my helpers.

I'm absolutely sure that you are using external data in your flash/flex applications. It is a good practice to transfer information in XML format. Most of the projects that I'm working on also use XML and in most of them I have a class that converts the data to JSON object. The problem with this workflow is that the parser's logic is always different because the XML is different. These days I wrote a class that solved this problem and directly converted every given XML file to a JSON object.

I already wrote an article on this topic (Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript (Extending / Inherit classes)), but last few days I realized that there are some things that I didn't explain.

The selectors are one of the most powerful features in CSS. Sometimes they can save you a lot of additional work. In this article I'll show you how to set the style of a specific child in a list of elements.

As you probably know JavaScript is not exactly OOP based language. Of course there are some ways to handle with this and you can still create classes and inherit them. It is much much better to use classes. Your application will be well structured and split to modules.