Building Stacks for Application State Management

Stacks are one of the most common data structures that one can think of. They are ubiquitous in both personal and professional setups. Stacks are a last in first out (LIFO) data structure, that provides some common operations, such as push, pop, peek, clear, and size.

In most object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, you would find the stack data structure built-in. JavaScript, on the other hand, was originally designed for the web; it does not have stacks baked into it, yet. However, don't let that stop you. Creating a stacks using JS is fairly easy, and this is further simplified by the use of the latest version of JavaScript.

In this chapter, our goal is to understand the importance of stack in the new-age web and their role in simplifying ever-evolving applications. Let's explore the following aspects of the stack:

• A theoretical understanding of the stack
• Its API and implementation
• Use cases in real-world web

Before we start building a stack, let's take a look at some of the methods that we want our stack to have so that the behavior matches our requirements. Having to create the API on our own is a blessing in disguise. You never have to rely on someone else's library getting it right or even worry about any missing functionality. You can add what you need and not worry about performance and memory management until you need to.