An experienced Javascript developer’s account of learning React
At our company, we have banned React, Angular and other "overengineered" JS frameworks.Our HTML is rendered from a standard boring Groovy server page, with some vanilla-js for DOM manipulations here and there.We have hired developers that were React fans, which quickly changed opinion that this old-school way for developing web applications is indeed better. It is faster to code, an order of magnitude easier to maintain, DOM rendering time is faster, so a click to open a new page/view happens instantly. Our web application is so fast, that non tech people and clients always comment how smooth and slick it behaves compared to Facebook or LinkedIn.Our clients are very happy with our solution too, as it is very simple for their developers to integrate our solution into their web application since it doesn't mess up their existing web framework. It doesn't block their rendering time, and it is easy for them to override changes.We also have one complex UI part in our application, which can consume some CPU. This part we render with canvas, and it feels like a native app as it runs stable at 60fps. Who wants to run a lot of slow DOM manipulations when canvas is a lot more efficient.