Dev’s Viewpoint: The Present and the Future of React

React, auch bekannt als ReactJS, hat sich in den letzten Jahren zur gefragtesten Frontend-Bibliothek entwickelt. Ursprünglich von Facebook entwickelt und auf die Entwicklung von Benutzeroberflächen fokussiert, steht diese Bibliothek heute hinter einer Vielzahl von Plattformen wie Netflix, Airbnb und Discord oder auch Medienseiten wie BBC und The New York Times. Warum ist ReactJS so populär geworden? Wird es auch im Jahr 2021 noch relevant sein? Um diese Technologie etwas besser kennenzulernen, haben wir Gonzalo Penovi, Senior Front-End-Entwickler bei intive, interviewt.

How long have you been working with React?

I started exploring React at the beginning of 2016, after reading that Netflix and AirBnB had adopted it for interface development. Since I was coming from Ruby on Rails, I had a hard time adapting to the change in paradigm. At the beginning of 2017, the company I was working for decided to move all its development to React and, since then, I’ve been using it in my job. Are you part of the React community in the region? What’s your opinion about its growth?

I’m not really active in the local community. When I started exploring this tech, there wasn’t much information about it, and everything you could read came from Europe or the US. Since then, I’ve been following conferences on related topics, and I’m always reading Medium to get an idea of the direction React is taking. Having said that, the local community is constantly growing, and you can clearly see that many developers are participating actively. Nowadays, it’s possible to learn React on your own and in Spanish. That wasn’t even a thing some years ago, and we owe it to the regional community. In your opinion, what’s the most valuable aspect of this library?

It’s really difficult to choose just one valuable thing, but if I had to, it would be its versatility and scalability. Want to create a one-page app? No problem, you can do so with Client Side Rendering out-of-the-box. A client is asking for a website for their business? Combine it with Next.js and Server Side Rendering and you’ll be able to seamlessly solve all the SEO issues. Do you need to add functionality to a legacy site in WordPress? Activate WordPress API, add React from CDN, and you are all set to go.

There are many React application examples, but its versatility, combined with such a big community, makes it possible to solve any front-end challenge just by knowing one library. It’s also worth mentioning that React is not the only front-end framework that allows us to work this way nowadays, but it’s definitely the most popular one and it also leads job hunts. As a developer, what kinds of projects do you find most appealing?

The thing I like the most about any project is the challenges it may bring and, consequently, its potential to scale. There are big challenges to rise to when you’re working on an app with many other developers, or when many people use the app (or both). And it’s even more challenging if this app has been running for many years. Personally, I like to stay updated and try to apply the new industry standards, but it’s virtually impossible to follow these trends for big apps, because they tend to emerge quite fast. I believe the greatest challenge for any engineer is to work with an operational and profitable product whose current stack usage is outdated.

Which tools nowadays do you find are the most useful?

I don’t use a vast variety of tools, or anything too fancy, but I do need to mention a few that help my performance the most:

What do you think React is missing that should be taken into account for the future?

To be honest, the things that React might have been missing, have already been solved as additional packages provided by the community! Right now, I can’t think of anything, but if I could, I’d probably find an npm package in 5 minutes just by searching Google.

If you had to give a piece of advice to someone who’s just starting to work with this technology, what would you tell them?

I’d tell them to focus on understanding Javascript’s internal operation and functional paradigm, besides getting to know the library itself. There’s no doubt that nowadays Javascript leads job hunts for the front-end. However, if we focus solely on understanding how React works, then once the paradigm changes or a different library becomes trendy, we won’t have any solid concepts to apply to new technologies. If we, however, manage to understand the language’s inner workings and programming paradigms, learning new libraries or frameworks will only be a matter of mastering the new syntax.


Wie können wir helfen?

Jetzt anfragen

Du willst ins Team? Gerne!

Mitmachen