React

React server-side rendering with Webpack

By Maurice de Beijer

There are times when the initial blank html page being download for a React application is not perfect. One reason might be Search Engine Optimization, another might be a slower initial render, especially on mobile devices. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a good reason you might want to do server-side rendering. While the Google bot executes JavaScript these days, and can potentially index your React application, other search engine bots don’t do so. The result is they just see the empty div where your application will be rendered on the real client and nothing worth indexing at all. The end … Continue reading React server-side rendering with Webpack

Creating a React based Chrome extension

By Maurice de Beijer

Creating Chrome extensions is quite easy. In fact it is so easy I found it hard to believe how quick I had a sample up and running. And given how useful Chrome extensions can be I wondered how hard it would be to create one using React. It turns out that it is easy   Creating a basic React app To get started I decided to create a React app using create-react-app.  This gave me a working React application to get started with. To turn an HTML page with JavaScript into a Chrome extension you need to add a package.json … Continue reading Creating a React based Chrome extension

Bring your own React

By Maurice de Beijer

React is a a great UI library from Facebook that works well for creating fast browser based user interfaces. Working with it is quite easy. Once you learn the basics you can be quite productive. But to create great applications it is helpful to understand some of the internals of React. But that is where things become a bit more complex. The React source code is not easy to understand. There are a lot of performance optimizations that make code harder to read. Also there are  a lot of browser related issues. Small differences that add a lot more complexity. … Continue reading Bring your own React