Welcome back! Not surprisingly that every developer wants to create a successful application that will appeal to both the customer and its users. Maybe some even dream to become an expert in developing ReactJS apps. But for this you need to master this library and run into more than one stone. Although it is better to learn from other people’s mistakes than from your own, so I wrote this article on how to avoid mistakes when working with React and create a successful project. Maybe you will see some mistakes and understand that you also make them. Let’s get started!
I think you know that ReactJS is a Javascript Library that is used to create complex User Interfaces (UI). The Facebook Company, which developed React for its internal purposes in 2013, published React as an open-source library and it became available to all developers, after that it began to gain its popularity. Many well-known companies now use React as their main development library. There are such companies as Instagram, Whatsapp, Netflix, Uber etc. This proves the popularity and relevance of this technology. But what is React’s secret, you ask? Why do such big and well-known companies use it? When engineers were developing Facebook, they faced a lot of problems. For example, data synchronization between different blocks of the site. These could be messages or notifications. Then they solved the problem quite simply – they split the entire site into different logical components that had their own logic and were written in JavaScript. Subsequently, they were named components.
But as you know, the JavaScript has one small problem – any work with a DOM-tree, that is, manipulating and changing is very difficult. If you update the DOM-tree very often, then your application will work slower, which is simply unacceptable. Many tools of that time, for example AngularJS, tried to solve the problem in different ways. It came up with such concepts as two-way data binding and others. But React went further, as it has a concept called a virtual DOM. React decided to abandon the standard understanding of the template in the component and offered an alternative. This is the creation of the component structure through JavaScript. This allowed React to know the exact structure of your application and, when changing certain areas, change only the necessary parts. This made it possible to significantly increase the speed of updating and rendering pages by hundreds of times. If we compare React with other popular tools,
Then we can outline three main differences:
1) it has a slightly less abstraction than other libraries; you can use the power of React in more detail and write more efficient applications accordingly;
2) React is a library, not a framework; that is, a library that simply renders some elements; this means that to create a complete application, you can use any set of tools you want and you are not limited; in fact, it also allows a lot of possibilities for very flexible solutions;
3) React is the most popular tool at the moment, it has the most users, that is, there is a huge number of solutions and some snippets on the Internet that you can easily find them and use on your project.
So, after getting acquainted with all the advantages and functions of the ReactJS, it seemed that there should be no problems when working with it. But let’s go back to the most common mistakes and useful tips for a ReactJS developer!
- The first thing we will consider is the File Organization. It’s very important but it’s done very poorly in a lot of cases. Most people use React to create a new application and your folder structure looks not so good. If we started continuing to add components CSS files just into the SRC folder we would end up with a huge mess really quickly. To avoid this, organize the folders like a chain. You will have for example assets folder, images, components, helper folders. And in the RegisterService folder, you can put other files. File and folder structure is very important. There’s no right or wrong way how to do it but it is something definitely important for your project. So if you’re starting a new project, you and your team should decide on some kind of standard that you wanna stick to and of course you have to think how quickly these apps grow and how maintainable your system is going to be. So, in React your file structure will grow rapidly considering every component that has at least one file associated with it.
- Some developers very often forget about optimization. You need to describe absolutely all the conditions for updating your components, try to describe their typing. Because the quality of the code depends on this, as well as how your application will work. Your app will run very slowly if you don’t pay enough attention to it.
- Large spaghetti codes. Starting from the very beginning, you need to create a large base of reused components as possible that will help you optimize, simplify support and test your application. Keep this in mind and try to reuse your code as often as possible. It is one of the best approaches you can think of. But keep in mind that reused components must be polished to perfection, covered with tests, all update conditions are described and things like that.
- Next popular mistake is to forget to use keys when you want to render a list of components. So you must specify which unique parameter will be the key. It is also bad practice to assign the key to the index of a given array. Because you will delete one element, and in all subsequent ones will change the index.
- Use fragments instead of s. Often we have a lot of components, which we have to wrap in a div, because render only allows one component to be returned. Because of this, we add an extra HTML element to the document.
Conclusion
So, now you know cool tips for creating a successful app and how not to do the same mistakes twice. This article has outlined all the intricacies of working with ReactJS and provided a little help for you. Thanks for reading, wish you happy coding!
