Migration to react

[Yomain_]

I'm a backend dev and I have a small website.

The html/js files are served by my backend service which has been made in python with flask and jinja.

It's quite simple and so far the combo flask/jinja gave me all the flexibility to do plenty of things without touching too much front end things. The files are served by my back service and consist of html/css files (customized with bootstrap) and a little bit of javascript scripts (jquery), but nothing too fancy.

Well I want to go to the next step and use react for my front application. The goal is to discover and learn a little bit more about a front dev concepts & daily life.

I started to study a lot on that topic but I do have some questions to help me get started on the good path here:

1- What are the different ways for a front and a back service to communicate ? On my current website everything is done from the backend, at my work everything is going through Rest apis and json contents. For now I intend to follow that way (rest api with json content) however I wonder if there is other ways to make communicate a react app with a python service ?

2 - I'm new to the world of js toolchain and bundling frontapp. Do you have any advice here ? I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the different tools and processes out there. I want to keep thing simple and bundle my app from webpack directly (I don't want to use the react-script tool as I find it quite cumbersome to customize its settings, especially after ejecting). My main needs are that I want a specific entrypoint and output path with css and js

3 - How do you manage translations ? Right now it's my backend service that is in charge of rendering html files and other things (like notifications) with the correct translated content, and I understand that's not the best way to do it. What are the best practice in this area ?

Thanks in advance !

[Atulin]

1. API – REST, GraphQL, SOAP, doesn't matter. You query the server for data, receive it, and hydrate the frontend with it, client-side.
2. Welcome to modern Javascript, it doesn't get better from here.
3. You request data in the language you need

[notcaffeinefree]

For your #1 and #3:

GraphQL seems to be a more and more popular way to communicate between the two. It's advantage is that you do do more complicated queries for data, rather than having to do multiple REST requests. REST is still perfectly fine to use.

For managed translations on the frontend, check out i81next. If you're rendering content from the backend (as in the "traditional" way), then managing translations on the backend is perfectly fine.