Dealing with asynchronous data flow

By default, Redux doesn't handle asynchronous data flow. There are several libraries out there that can help you with these tasks. However, for the purpose of this chapter, we will build our own implementation using middleware functions to give the dispatch method the ability to dispatch and handle asynchronous data flow.

Getting ready

In this recipe, you will build an ExpressJS application with a very small API to test your application when making HTTP requests and dealing with asynchronous data flow and errors. First, create a new package.json file with the following content:

{ 
    "dependencies": { 
        "express": "4.16.3", 
        "node-fetch": "2.1.2", 
        "redux": "4.0.0" 
    } 
} 

Then install the dependencies by opening a Terminal and running:

npm install

How to do it...

Build a simple RESTful API server that will have two endpoints or answer to paths /time and /date when a GET request is made. However, on /date path, we will pretend that...