from Hacker News

How we switched our template rendering engine to React

by eldude on 11/18/16, 11:49 PM with 39 comments

• by xmatos on 11/19/16, 1:33 PM

  Best web app I've developed was basically Django, with bare minimum JavaScript to handle some in-page effects. People been trying to shoehorn desktop concepts in the web since forever and it will never work. A desktop app is installable, a web site is not. It makes no sense to wait your js app to download for the sake of smooth page transitions.

  Take a look at reddit's new mobile site, written in react. It takes around 7 seconds to load, to display text and links. Compare that to HN's, which loads in 0.1 sec, for basically the same content.

  SPA's have their place, for things like games or the likes of google maps. But for the rest, please respect the web paradigm . Your site will be simpler to build, faster and most importantly, lighter. The web world has become mobile-first, not js-centric...

• by krob on 11/19/16, 8:51 PM

  SPA is mostly useful for reducing the cost of large application deployments. It improves speed for loading the initial bootstraping of the application. That means index is delivered almost instantly, and depending on the async loading of the code, can be dramatically speed up. SPA will reduce the overall server-rending of content besides json results which will be compressed, and json is smaller than html markup. Also SPA provides for a more sophisticated user experience. But like all things, the original cars got people from a-z, but not in style or comfort. As technologies improve over time, so will the reasons for using SPA. Browsers eventually will allow offline browsing as a standard feature, and having the SPA JS installed & json written to localstore/indexedDB will make using that UI rather nice, instead of always getting a 404 response when you have no internet and such. SPA is about control, server-rendered requires connectivity and difficulty handling response when failure occurs. 1st Major SPA's were email clients, consider google's gmail or microsoft web outlook service for exchange servers. Huge benefit with SPA, because the UI is complex and should not be constantly refreshing, because it can cause contextual change on what is displayed and present in-app state from re-initialization.

• by christophilus on 11/19/16, 2:44 PM

  This is totally anecdotal, but my wife and my mom both commented to me recently on how Pinterest's latest UI changes have really slowed the site down in their experience. I wonder if React is partially at fault there?

• by bwd1992 on 11/19/16, 3:52 AM

  Would have liked to have seen some figures or graphs visualising the React performance boost.

  Also I thought one of the advantages of using a js framework is that rendering can be done on the client? It sounds from this article that server rendering is more advantageous?

  Also SEO was mentioned, but I thought javascript was taken into consideration by web crawlers?

• by nsomaru on 11/19/16, 2:17 PM

  I saw a presentation about REST and it included the concept of 'on demand code'; why do we need to serve up all our react components in a js blob? Can't we serve up minified and compressed components preemptively on the wire to keep load times small? Would this offer a benefit or am I missing something?

• by abritinthebay on 11/19/16, 3:43 AM

  Congrats to the team!