Nice tut, although I've learned one thing during past couple of months of developing with Redux: middleware is very useful and often quite an overlooked/underused part of the stack.
In this tutorial, the author makes the call directly in an action, which is not its responsibility. Here's an example of the "api" middleware we've developed (https://gist.github.com/tomazzaman/a98f5ad3f052592e564862e4d...), and the beautiful part is, this is the only file in which async calls are made. And it's a rather small file, which allows me to change to any ajax library (like the native fetch when it gets more support) I want at any time, with very little development.
Bottom line: middleware is awesome, give it a try. :)
Doing API calls inside async action creators / thunks _is_ entirely valid - in the end, it's still "creating actions". Just a question of how much duplication you want to deal with, consolidation, etc.
But yeah, middleware is a concept that isn't talked about as much, but on the flip side, there's dozens and dozens of middlewares people have created. In fact, there's at least a couple dozen middlewares I've seen _just_ for doing AJAX calls. See my list at https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem-links/blob/ma... .
In this tutorial, the author makes the call directly in an action, which is not its responsibility. Here's an example of the "api" middleware we've developed (https://gist.github.com/tomazzaman/a98f5ad3f052592e564862e4d...), and the beautiful part is, this is the only file in which async calls are made. And it's a rather small file, which allows me to change to any ajax library (like the native fetch when it gets more support) I want at any time, with very little development.
Bottom line: middleware is awesome, give it a try. :)