redux-saga is a library that aims to make application side effects (i.e. asynchronous things like data fetching and impure things like accessing the browser cache) easier to manage, more efficient to execute, easy to test, and better at handling failures. The mental model is that a saga is like a separate thread in your application that's solely responsible for side effects. redux-saga is a redux middleware, which means this thread can be started, paused and cancelled from the main application with normal redux actions, it has access to the full redux application state and it can dispatch redux actions as well. It uses an ES6 feature called Generators to make those asynchronous flows easy to read, write and test. (if you're not familiar with them here are some introductory links) By doing so, these asynchronous flows look like your standard synchronous JavaScript code. (kind of like async/await, but generators have a few more awesome features we need).
Features
- Makes data fetching and browser cache access more efficient
- Makes application side effects easier to execute, and easier to test
- It can be started, paused and cancelled from the main application with normal redux actions
- Has access to the full redux application state
- Uses an ES6 feature called Generators to make flows easy to read