COREbeat front-end design and why we chose React
COREbeat front-end design
Why we chose React
Authors: Alexandros Rezkalla, Elias Mantouvalos
14th November 2022
The structure, design, behavior, and content of everything seen on browser are termed as front end. The languages used for front-end development are HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Another name for front end is “client side”. It includes everything that the users experience directly: text, colors, styles, images, graphs, tables, navigation menus etc.
Contrary to front end, users will never interact with the back end directly. The front end is what users see and interact with, while the back end is everything that happens in the background.
The foundations for front-end development are the HTML/ CSS programming languages that produce static pages. As the need for interactivity is more and more in demand, Javascript, a flexible programming language was created and then different libraries and frameworks were developed by the community. A coding library is a collection of standard functionalities – pieces of reusable code such as math functions or others, that are inserted into the code as supplementary functions, whereas frameworks are complete tools that expand the productivity of their base technology (CSS, HTML, JavaScript).
Nowadays, we have a few options when it comes to frameworks. The most used, supported and well documented are React, Angular and Vue. They all do the same thing but in a different manner and with a different syntax. Angular is a full-fledged and opinionated framework that provides all the functionalities out of the box, but with a steep learning curve and increased complexity. Vue is much more flexible and simpler, but it becomes cumbersome for big projects. React has hit a sweet spot among its competitors since it is as simple as it needs to be but with enough rules making it suitable for the development of large-scale projects.
After careful consideration, our framework of choice for COREbeat web application was React. This decision was based on some key advantages:
· Documentation
· Community support
· Third party tools
· Wide selections of libraries
React offers the freedom to developers to choose the tools they need without the extra bundle that Angular comes with. That results in a smaller application size and a better development experience overall. While Vue does something like this, the support for React is much better. Acknowledging the importance of documentation and support, the Facebook team behind React constantly listens to the open-source community to implement new features.
