Universal React ◆ 24 ways
I have no hands-on experience with React, but this tutorial by Jack Franklin looks like a great place to start. Before the tutorial begins he succinctly and clearly outlines the perfect architecture for building on the web today:
- The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page.
- In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page.
- The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control.
- If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again.
YES!!!
Y’know, I had a chance to chat briefly with Jack at the Edge conference in London and I congratulated him on the launch of a Go Cardless site that used exactly this technique. He told me that the decision to flip the switch and make it act as a single page app came right at the end of the project. I think that points to a crucial mindset that’s reiterated here:
Now we’ll build the React application entirely on the server, before adding the client-side JavaScript right at the end.
