React - 2017 - web dev

React - 2017 - web dev

Not long ago I was in a conf session which group by a brunch of passionate javascript developer. Somehow I was managed to have conversation with a few of them, some interest finding are they tend to pick the first Dev topic which is related to "React". I am not so sure why it matters to every developer in the room at that moment. My impression of React is

1. Facebook
2. Abstracting the DOM element life cycle

Note that I did not put "Fast" as one of my impression. We will come back to that point. Stay with me.

Could we try using React in production of HKTVmall Website ? The answer would be NO. Following would be a bit of explanation together with how to make it possible for a YES answer.

What if React does not existed?
ES6 would not be blending in so quick. (You could use ES5 with react, but it looks stupid to me.)
With ES6, I could code faster. However you probably need a bit of time to pickup the beauty, try with Egghead in here.
Developer has to manage their lifecycle for each js module, which we did perfectly well in HKTVmall, however sometime is a bit tired when doing that.

Is it just React being awesome?
NO. I would say Babel + Webpack + React as a package that make web dev awesome.
and because of that Facebook create Create-React-App. I tried and did my homework to feel what it is like, I would give 5 stars.

Then Why we cannot use it?
It change your workflow! You will need Babel and Webpack in the build flow. This is a good enough reason for not doing it in production yet. We have to make sure when things go wrong, we know how to fix.

But isn't that we can speedup our web dev by using React?
I don't think so, as I mention above, your team need to invest the time for bringing in Babel, Webpack and React. We are not solving a problem at all!

We are creating problems....
a problem we think we are slow in developing web app.
a problem we think the browser is slow when running our own code.
a problem we think the DOM is reacting slow on user interaction.

Think again.
Define what is "slow" and "fast" in your team....
Have you ever profiling your code....
What are users thinking when they are interacting the app....

Without Problems there are no solutions