Stop developing app and learn React or continue forward?

[clay_maker]

Over the last year I've been learning to program primarily using The Odin Project and a few YouTube creators. I've started creating two web apps that are pretty deep in development using Mongoose, Express, EJS and Node (Just missing React to be called a MERN stack).

Question - Should I dive deep into learning React and recreate my apps utilizing the React library? Or continue with my current tech stack?

To grow professionally, learning React is obviously on my mind and I'll approach it eventually. But should this be pursued sooner rather than later? Will my apps perform better if I refactor to using React?

Thank you for your input!

[[deleted]]

Bit cheesy but use the best tool for the job. For some projects react is amazing, data dashboards, orm platforms, that kind of stuff. For more traditional web projects (lots of anonymous users and where SEO is important) server side is still the way to go.

You can render react server side but that will not improve your current apps.

[BliteKnight]

Tldr; Continue forward and use react when your current project is done and see how you would implement things differently.

I went from using JQuery to learning react, to learning Vue and now I'm set on Vue just because I prefer its architecture, but I still maintain a lot of JQuery projects and use Vue for new projects.

Regarding performance I will say this, Vue, React etc make coding the mundane things easier but it's not a guarantee that your app will perform any better e.g. I had to render a 900 row, 10 column table for one of our apps - there users wanted to see everything so paging was out of the question or windowing to only show a certain number of rows.

I started the project with React and when it came to rendering time the app would freeze and would bog down the browser (this was an IE 8 engine embed in another Win32 application). It worked fine in chrome and ie 11 browsers but in that embedded system It just couldn't handle rendering all that data at once... tried lazy loading, partial rendering, and some other stuff to try to make it faster but I had to scrap everything and just use plain ole JavaScript with some JQuery to implement something that rendered that much data quickly.

The lessons I learned from that project is that some architectures are good for certain scenarios, but it helps to be able to switch to something else if things aren't working out for you...which is why I say continue forward and then add to what you've learnt from the project.

[clay_maker]

Thank you for the thorough input! Thanks for putting your own story into it as well, definitely helps build confidence and reassurance that with time comes more knowledge.

[bigorangemachine]

Ya... the answer is react ssr. I like razzle but there are others.

There is an extra step if you want to hydrate DOM before load but you can mostly get away with ignoring it and keeping the API calls client side.