All Blogs Go to Heaven

Exploring React

Published: Aug. 15, 2019, 6:17 p.m.

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I don't think I will ever be a devoted frontend developer, but it's good to know a bit about how everything works and it is very useful for personal projects to be able to at least get things working. To this end I have been spending some time learning React.

I am not in a position to compare all of the Javascript frameworks and possible site architectures. The idea of a Single Page Application (or at least Only-a-Few-Pages Application) makes sense (even slow computers are very fast but network transfer will probably not catch up in the near future), but there are a lot of ways to do it. I chose React because of an existing open source React project that contains a lot of code that will be useful for a project I want.

After a few weeks, I'm pretty excited. Writing a React app feels a lot more like coding than a template language for injecting variables. Defining classes and implementing them as components in a React app feels more familiar to me. I'm sure this is partly due to the fact that I haven't written much vanilla Javascript. If I weren't already an expert I may not be so enamored of React. But React seems to make sense to me and it's pretty popular, so it's a lock.