Blog / Programming / Short React Story

Short React Story

By Pavel Bragin 7,034 August 9, 2016

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Today we want to talk about front-end technology that nowadays, is becoming more and more popular.

It’s name React, created by a collaboration of Facebook and Instagram to make pretty fast job, while you are working on a front-end. Last year we were watching how most of our clients started their new projects, and refactored some old one using it. We know some reasons, why they choose it, instead of Angular 1. * or Angular 2 for example.

One of the reason, it is because today you can easily find right React developer to build your project, and then, during the years, you will be able to fix and add new features to it, with no worries that you won’t find someone to help you. Otherwise React is just a library not a complete framework, so developers spend less time to start working with it in comparison with Angular.

Also, it is fast growing technology with large developer’s community, every month React is becoming more and more powerful instrument. But still, there are an issues where you had to reinvent the wheel using it, for sure.

What can we say about it’s another advantages (no matter that it’s not a complete framework) that allows you to build fast views. Further will be some reasons that may be interesting for developers, so if you are not one of them, see below.

You can always tell how your component will render by looking at one file. If you know the state, you know the rendered output. This may be the most important benefit, even though it is not different from Angular templates.
You use JSX in React, it is some weird mix of HTML and JS, but working with it seems really nice and comfortable.
You can render React on the server. You could render all on the client side, but you should not, and you can render it on a server, to have some cosmic speed. Also it’s call an isomorphic application.

Here some devs advantages will be over, not because there are no others, but just to reach a purpose that this article should be short and readable.

Other important issue, is that React is good for SEO. The biggest problem with JS frameworks, is that they are not friendly with search engines. So you’d have some problems with your project advertising. But in our case, you can run React.js on the server, (the virtual DOM will be rendered to the browser as a regular web page) it means that it will be easy for search engine to find your page content.

Considering our experience we can say that UI components is the future of web development in many other ways and it is rationally to start working with this future today. So “wait for the cat to jump”.

Here in Soshace we decided to focus more on React, instead of Angular, not because we did not have right developers, but just because the market is going this way. We like Angular and it’s complicated and well documented functionality (also it is proper framework), but when the Angular 2 story just starts, and for now there are a lot of problems at the beginning (as we found out), Angular 1.* is slowly losing its positions.

We had built and continue to work in numbers of React projects, and have accumulated a lot of experience in it, so you can rely on our team in development project with that technology.