While the perfect framework or library might not exist, for a pair of Seattle technologists, the virtues of one programming tool have made it a favorite for recent projects.
“React is an awesome framework with simple concepts. Compared to other similar frameworks, it has a relatively small learning curve,” Shagai Nyamdorj, senior software engineer at OfferUp, said. Nyamdorj and his colleagues leaned on both React and React Native when rewriting the buying-and-selling platform’s mobile and web app last year.
Nick Zaremba, director of front-end development at hosting provider Hostwinds, praised React for its reusable components, which let the team design and build a component library without handling business logic. Recently, his team moved from PHP to React and Gatsby when overhauling the company’s marketing site.
Below, Zaremba and Nyamdorj outlined their recent use cases of the technology, as well its respective strengths and weaknesses compared to Vue and Angular.
Vue vs. React. vs. Angular: Which is your team's preferred programming tool and why?
Our team's favorite framework is React TypeScript. React is an awesome framework with simple concepts. Compared to other similar frameworks, it has a relatively small learning curve. Based on my previous experience, it was easier explaining and coaching other developers with different backgrounds, such as native iOS or Java Android developers. Within a few weeks, we successfully ramped up our developers with no prior JavaScript React experience to become professional React developers.
In the last few years, the React community has rapidly grown and matured, due to Facebook backing up and heavily investing in the technology. TypeScript helps us type-check and detect simple bugs during development. It prevents us from pushing bugs in our production deployments. Additionally, combined with the VS Code and TypeScript, it improves our development velocity drastically because of nice autocomplete and tooltip on the method and variable signature on IDE.
React is an awesome framework with simple concepts.”
Tell us about the most recent project you worked on using this tool.
Last year, we decided to rewrite our entire mobile and web app in React and React Native. It was a really exciting opportunity for us. In my 12 years as a developer, I have never seen such a great opportunity to build one of the most popular applications on the App Store using the latest technology.
Why was it the right framework for this particular project?
In my opinion, React Native gives us two main benefits. First, consistency between clients’ single code base. We can have a single code base across platforms: web, iOS and Android. Previously, we were maintaining three different code bases for iOS, Android and web. There was lots of duplicated effort for single business logic and often we had to sync the features between three different platforms.
Performance and maturity is another benefit. React Native is mature enough to handle mobile performance for large applications. Over the last few years, React Native has made huge progress on performance on native implementation. When it first came out, things were different. For complex screens, performance was a huge issue. On top of that, there are many unknown issues for integrating native, third-party libraries and setting up development environments. Thanks to the huge effort on Facebook’s side, the framework has improved a lot in the last few releases.
What are some of the pros and cons of these other technologies?
I have been using Angular since 2013. I started using React in 2018. I have been a superfan of Angular since it first came out in 2010.
React is easy to learn with a simple design and use of JSX in everything is a function in React. In Angular, there are pipes, directives, templates and controllers. Third-party tools and libraries are becoming more popular and getting mature enough. Also, data-binding is one-way, meaning less unwanted side effects. With Hooks and Contexts API, state management became super simple and clean, with less code compared to previously larger applications that were using Redux.
On the other hand, React is not opinionated and leaves developers to make choices about the best way to develop. Sometimes, it is very hard to make a decision and agree on something using React, especially if you have a large team.
Vue vs. React. vs. Angular: Which is your team's preferred programming tool and why?
When looking for a front-end JavaScript library that would allow us to build robust, scalable products, the three most popular come to mind: Vue, React and Angular. It didn’t take us long to decide that React would be our core programming tool: we all love it, and all of our products ship with it under the hood.
Many developers use React for its simplicity, support for server-side rendering, progressive web app support and its blazing speed, thanks to the virtual DOM. React is great because it lets us focus on writing JavaScript code rather than framework-specific code. What we love most is that we are able to easily create reusable components that let us design and build a component library without worry of handling any business logic.
Tell us about the most recent project you worked on using this tool.
We recently redesigned our marketing site. Not only did we fully redesign the site’s style, but we migrated from PHP to React and Gatsby.
Gatsby is a static site generator that lets us build sites that are progressive web apps, follow latest web standards and use the latest technologies including React, webpack and GraphQL.
Why was it the right framework/library for this particular project?
React easily integrates with Gatsby and other technologies that we use. React’s beauty lies in its ability to easily use reusable components. Since all of our products use React, we can pull components from our component library that we created and use them in all of our projects, which makes all styling homogenous and increases our development speed.
Vue is great: picture it as the child of Angular and React.”
What are some of the pros and cons of these other technologies?
React, Vue and Angular have their own own pros and cons. Depending on the situation, one technology will be better to use than the other. In my experience, however, React has always been the best choice. I highly recommend it for its many pros, including fast speeds, thanks to the virtual DOM; support for server-side rendering; progressive web app support; easy integration with other frameworks like Redux; the ability to create easily testable reusable code with functional programing concepts; and the ability to type safe using TypeScript or Flow.
Angular is great for enterprise applications and it provides a full-blown framework for developers; however, the drawback of that is the steep learning curve. I like Angular because it’s used alongside TypeScript, which is great for type-safe code and is a must-have skill for any developer. Compared to React, it has a lot of boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome while developing and is known for having a slower performance.
Vue is great: picture it as the child of Angular and React. It has similarities to both technologies, but it doesn’t have as much support, which is its biggest con.
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