XState offers several primitives for representing long-running application processes. These are usually expressed as services. I’ve written a bit about services here - but today I wanted to talk about my favourite way of expressing services: the Invoked Callback.
37 posts tagged with “xstate”
View all tagsXState offers several ways of orchestrating side effects. Since it’s a statechart tool, with significantly more power than a reducer, side effects are treated as a first-class concept.
State machines offer several API’s for expressing state. Like other tools, you can keep arbitrary values in a store (usually expressed as an object) called context.
The finite state machine is one of the oldest models of computation in computer science. It’s older than the web, older than any programming language you can think of, and probably older than you. Just ask Mealy (1955) or Moore (1956). Finite state machines (FSMs) can be implemented in any modern language using control-flow statements, yet there’s most likely a state machine library (if not many) in all of those languages.
XState can feel overwhelming. Once you’ve gone through Kyle or David’s courses and read through the docs, you’ll get a thorough understanding of the API. You’ll see that XState is the most powerful tool available for managing complex state.
The challenge comes when integrating XState with React. Where should state machines live in my React tree? How should I manage parent and child machines?
My code contains Horcruxes. I’m not proud to admit it, since to make a Horcrux you need to commit a murder. The murders seemed intuitive at the time, and were usually for expedience. But nonetheless, I am a murderer.
Let’s talk about how I got here.
XState version 4.7 has just been released. This is a minor version bump, but a major reworking of the internal algorithms, a lot of new capabilities, bug fixes, and a better TypeScript experience. It also paves the road for even more utilities, like @xstate/test and @xstate/react, as well as compatibility with other 3rd-party tools across the ecosystem, and even across languages.