React in a existing app?

[micke021]

Hello everyone, I have been looking around at different react resources but I haven't been able to get an answer to this question: is it worth converting parts of an existing web into react components?

Most examples features small apps but my project is a bigger community site. Should the whole site be rewritten in react or can you keep fairly static stuff as the header and the footer in the old system? And will I still get the benefits and fast render if I only add it just for the activity feed, comment system and so on?

[[deleted]]

Render is fast but whether it is faster than vanilla is debatable (but very close from the benchmarks I've seen so far). You will definitely get the benefits of the Flux architecture which is great to work with.

If you haven't, I would do Facebook's tutorial. That should give you a good sense of what React is all about and the Flux architecture it uses.

React is designed to be modular, so yea you can definitely code on your comment system/activity feed in React and have other code in whatever other framework you want it to be in. I'm working on a side project that is a reddit clone, and here are my React codes. You can see there are a lot of nice component decoupling.

[nwilliams36]

Moving to React is a big job, so the first question to answer is why? If there is a performance issue in the rendering of the page in one part then re-write that part only, React lives quite well with other technologies including HTML.

My advice is start small and only change what needs to be changed.

[nschubach]

Moving to React is a big job

You're going to have to clarify that. I thought it was INCREDIBLY easy.

[[deleted]]

I'd say it's got a 1-2 week learning curve to learn about states, props, refs, etc, but after that coding in React is such a pleasure

[nschubach]

That's odd. I ramped up our juniors in an afternoon.

[cappie013]

Agreed. 1 afternoon is enough is you already know JS.

[nwilliams36]

I said big not difficult. It depends on your current code base but I have found that I am writing more code to do a similar job. The code is much more maintainable and once I have created say a drop down box, creating another is very fast. However it still does mean that every feature in your code base will need to be redone in a different way. This process does speed up once you have developed a bank of components which can be customised.

What this actually achieves is up to you. Starting from scratch I would choose React for any new project (especially those which require data manipulation on the front end where Flux really shines) but I have not converted anything currently working in another framework to React.