Getting Started

In the world of web development, one of the most popular libraries used by developers is ReactJS. It provides a way to build interactive user interfaces with ease. Today, we are going to dive into a specific topic - displaying panes in ReactJS. Think of a "pane" as a section or a part of your web page. It can be a sidebar, a header, a footer, or any other part of your webpage.

Understanding Components

In ReactJS, we use things called 'components' to build our application. Components are like building blocks, each having its own structure and behavior. Imagine you are playing with a set of Lego blocks. Each Lego block can be thought of as a component. When you start, you have many individual blocks (components). As you start combining these blocks, you end up with a beautiful structure (our application).

Creating a Simple Pane Component

So let's start by creating a simple pane component. This will be our Lego block that we will use to build our application.

import React from 'react';

function Pane() {
  return (
    <div className="pane">
      This is a pane.
    </div>
  );
}

export default Pane;

In the code above, we created a functional component called Pane. This component returns a div with the class name of 'pane' and some text inside it.

Styling the Pane Component

Let's add some style to our pane. We can use CSS to do this. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it's what we use to make our website look good. It's like choosing the color and shape of our Lego blocks.

.pane {
  border: 1px solid black;
  padding: 10px;
  margin: 10px;
}

Here, we added a border around our pane, along with some padding and margin. Padding is the space inside the border of our element, and margin is the space outside the border of our element.

Displaying Multiple Panes

Now that we have our pane component ready, let's display multiple panes. To do this, we just need to use our Pane component multiple times.

import React from 'react';
import Pane from './Pane';

function App() {
  return (
    <div className="app">
      <Pane />
      <Pane />
      <Pane />
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

This will display three panes on our webpage.

Making Panes Interactive

Now, let's make our panes interactive. We can do this by using 'state' in our components. State is like the memory of our component. It remembers information about the component. For example, whether a pane is open or closed.

Let's add a button to our pane that will toggle the pane between open and closed states.

import React, { useState } from 'react';

function Pane() {
  const [isOpen, setIsOpen] = useState(false);

  return (
    <div className={`pane ${isOpen ? 'open' : ''}`}>
      This is a pane.
      <button onClick={() => setIsOpen(!isOpen)}>Toggle</button>
    </div>
  );
}

export default Pane;

In the code above, we added a button to our pane. When clicked, the button changes the 'isOpen' state of the pane. If 'isOpen' is true, the pane is open and if 'isOpen' is false, the pane is closed.

Wrapping Up

To sum up, we learned how to display panes in ReactJS. We started by understanding what components are and how they are like Lego blocks. We then created a simple pane component and styled it using CSS. We learned how to display multiple panes and then made our panes interactive by adding a toggle button.

Remember, it's all about playing with these Lego blocks. The more you play, the more comfortable you get. So keep practicing and experimenting with different ways to build and style your components. And before you know it, you'll be creating complex applications with ease.

Just like a beautiful Lego structure, a great application is built one block at a time. So take your time, enjoy the process, and happy coding!