CategoryReact

April 12, 2016 — These frameworks and the whole idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript never appealed to me, though. I always thought, why not just learn Swift/Objective-C or Java and build real apps? That definitely requires a significant amount of learning, but isn’t that what we developers do and should be good at? Quickly learn new languages and frameworks? What’s the point, then? For me, the advantages never outweighed the doubts. Read more…

April 7, 2016 — React has proved tremendously successful, both on Clayton Anderson’s own projects, and with many others around the web, including large companies like Netflix. And now with React Native, the framework has been brought to mobile. React Native is a great option for creating performant iOS and Android apps that feel at home on their respective platforms. In this article, Clayton will explain why he thinks you should consider using React Native, by providing an overview of the framework and what he believes to be its best features. Read more…

March 2, 2016 — Web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting point, from which to apply development and design patterns. In this article, Dmitry Nutels will show you examples that will get you to the point of being able to be a better judge of how, in your particular application, a server-side rendering solution should be approached. The evolution steps he’ll go through are hardly comprehensive, especially in the area of data retrieval on the server. There is a lot of additional work being done by tools and frameworks that have been inspired and enabled by React: Redux, Relay, Fluxible, Alt and so many, many more. Read more…

December 28, 2015 — In this article, Ilya Zayats will show you that, from React’s perspective, there is no difference at all in what to render. React helps to organize an application into small, human-digestible chunks. You can avoid any complex internal interactions between small components, while your application continues to be blazingly fast due to the DOM-diffing that React does under the hood. Trying to grasp what’s wrong with a graph or visualization just by looking at SVG generator templates is often overwhelming, and attempts to maintain internal structure or separation of concerns are often complex and tedious. So, can we apply the same techniques to web graphics — SVG in particular? Yes! Read more…

May 6, 2015 — Despite our pursuit to do a better job every day, sometimes we forget about accessibility, the practice of designing and developing in a way that’s inclusive of people with disabilities.These days, we build a lot of client-rendered web applications, also known as single-page apps, JavaScript MVCs and MV-whatever. AngularJS, React, Ember, Backbone.js, Spine: You may have used or seen one of these JavaScript frameworks in a recent project. Common user experience-related characteristics include asynchronous postbacks, animated page transitions, and dynamic UI filtering. In this article, Marcy Sutton will explore techniques for building accessible client-rendered web applications, making our jobs as web creators even more worthwhile. Read more…

April 21, 2015 — Recently, with the creation of modern web frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, we’ve seen a push to render on the client and only use a server for an API. We’re now seeing a possible return or, rather, more of a combination of both architectures happening. Web architecture definitely goes through cycles. We started out rendering everything on the server and shipping it down to the client. Then, JavaScript came along, and we started using it for simple page interactions. At some point, JavaScript grew up and we realized it could be used to build large applications that render all on the client and that use the server to retrieve data through an API. Read more…